It's just the same old raving
condolence. The same old wild sympathy
pulled up to prove you're not
without a heart.
- 'Against Devotion', And Her Soul Out of Nothing

At some point, if you're lucky, you're going to open a book/see a movie/hear a song/glimpse a face that, like some bright red button marked DO NOT PRESS, will absolutely reset your insides: foundationally, wiring-wise, the view out your windows, the kind of gas your car runs on, the noises your pets make, everything. Buckminister Fuller once said that intuition is actually cosmic fishing: you put your line out, see what comes.

I haven't the foggiest what I was in need of 16 months ago when I picked up the Best American Poetry of 2000 and found, somewhere in the middle of the collection, a poem that, as I read it on break from working at a bookstore and smoking a cigarette despite the summer heat, absolutely reset me. I can't recall but I know my tendencies, so I probably read the poem six or seven times right then, spent the rest of the day reading it about once an hour, then spent the next day or two or three scouring for every mite of information I could find about the poet (and, throughout the whole thing, pissing off anyone who hazarded near me and had to hear me spout on and on about this fucking amazing poet).

The poem was one called 'Six apologies, lord' and to parse it into digestible quotes is close to heresy for me but it's copyright protected so we’ll have to content ourselves with the first eight lines:

I Have Loved My Horrible Self, Lord.
I Rose, Lord, And I Rose, Lord, And I,
Dropt. Your Requirements, Lord. ÔSpite Your Requirements, Lord,
I Have Loved The Low Voltage Of The Moon, Lord,
Until There Was No Moon Intensity Left, Lord, No Moon Intensity Left
For You, Lord. I Have Loved The Frivolous, The Fleeting, The Frightful
Clouds. Lord, I Have Loved Clouds! Do Not Forgive Me, Do Not
Forgive Me LordandLover, HarborandMaster, GuardianandBread, Do Not.

The poet's name is Olena Kalytiak Davis and in 1997 her first collection of poetry, And Her Soul Out Of Nothing, was released by the University of Wisconsin, Madison, having won the annual Brittingham Prize. She published in all sorts of amazing journals and, for me, in the summer of 2002, that was it: one beautiful poem I'd found led me to one beautiful book.

The entire reason you're reading anything herein about OKDavis and her poems like fast cars that oscillate between pure bliss and terror with the flick of a linebreak is because she's had a new collection released, this time through the recent collaboration between Tin House magazine and Bloomsbury (this is their second release). While the newest book, Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities, is of itself well deserving of any number of multi-thousand word articles praising and genuflecting toward it, the dynamic between the first and second books, and what that dynamic portends to regarding OKDavis as a poet, is about as amazing, exciting, and a development as anyone who reads poetry could ask for (as in: imagine what's next).

Okay, so some caution: If you're feeling like there's a chance that a majority of your life is sort of cliff-sitting or precipice-bound at the moment, Olena Kalytiak Davis' poetry will be a monumental boot, and you will tumble. If that's not your brand of vodka, find a new drink. And Her Soul is one of the most quiet books you could ever find—not quiet as in empty, quiet as in the sound of one person in an automobile, hands on the wheel, car turned off, 11pm, and there's a glacial ache landscaping the entire book.

The brilliance of the book is how eerie and verbed the whole thing is. What flounders about most look-here's-my-hurt poetry is the static-ness— nothing's dull about a broken heart unless you just stare at it. What OKDavis did better than about anyone in that book was move: the heart may have been broken but the person on the next barstool kept unspooling their own lament; the trees may have been leafless but the wind was everywhere.

All of which, balanced against my own entry into her world, was shocking: nothing about 'Six apologies, lord' was quiet or still. The demonic energy of the lines, the gutsy language and declarations, that violent close: these were, for me, for awhile, unsquarable with the quiet book I'd fallen for.

"As in real life, I like the intense, the difficult, the over the top. And I like the of the now, the off the cuff."
-OK Davis

As for Olena Kalytiak Davis' Shattered Sonnets... I've now read through the book twice in as many hours, hoping for some illustrative example of what's so outlandishly cartwheeling, sexy, brash, ebullient, joyful-despite-brokenness about her collection, but as soon as I find something I'm too far gone to be able to pull some line quote. More than that, the poems are too complete, in and of themselves, as somersaults, to be line quoted anyway.

The first poem, 'Sweet reader, flanneled and tulled' begins:

Reader unmov'd and Reader unshaken, Reader unseduc'd
and unterrified, through the long-loud and the sweet-still
I creep toward you. Toward you, I thistle and climb.

Anyone could parse this out, pinpoint the stress where it balances on itself, talk about the overtly seductive lines and the timidity of the narrator's language. But from this there's no way other than through the poem to get to:

Dear, I understand youyourself may be hard-
pressed to bare this small and un-necessary burden
having only just recently gotten over the clean clear heart-

break of spring.

Shattered Sonnets... is brassy in an almost drunkenly emotional way, though hardly the wild drunk at a partyful of drunks. This book is both intensely dense and sprawling, filled with poetry that seems to grow more urgent with each line. Where there was a hesitant urgency in And Her Soul…, Shattered Sonnets…has this exuberant vigor, is, in every way, red-cheeked and breathless.

I'm sometimes the lucky recipient of free books that nice people send to me and I get to read, think and then talk about. Most of these books are Advance Reader Copies, which aside from typically being paperback, are also typically dull, cover-wise, and have caveats saying things like 'A (fill in the publisher) Guerilla squad will hunt you down if you even think of quoting from this unless you've compared it to the Real Thing, which we won't send to you gratis.' And there's usually something that warns the reviewer against assuming what the book will actually look, taste, feel or smell like in its final form: it could shrink or expand, it might seduce a new cover artist. Books can be wily.

But on no other Advance Reader Copy have I read a line like the one on the back of Shattered Sonnets...: "This is an uncorrected proof and...does not reflect the quality, page size, or thickness of the finished book." (italics mine) I'd love to commend Bloomsbury/Tin House on their prescience that the thickness of any Olena Kalytiak Davis book is something impossible to reflect or gauge. One can never be sure of the world one book will eventually contain now, can one?

I'd argue that Olena Kalytiak Davis' Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities will never, even now that it's published and available probably pretty near to where you now are, on a shelf or displayed, in hardcover, less expensive than the beauty it's worth, have a thickness anyone will with veracity be able to calculate. This book is both an explosion and the explosion's whisper of what it feels like, and there's little point to pretending that the reach of its limbs is finite. Step however near you'd like: if you need it (and you probably do), this book's limbs will find you.

© 2003 by Weston Cutter. All rights reserved.