Davis's poems are empowering and vulnerable, honest and embodied.
In Late Summer Ode, Olena Kalytiak Davis writes from a heightened state of ambivalence, perched between past and present tensions. With Chekovian humor and metered pathos, from a garden in Anchorage not pining for Brooklyn, these poems "self -protest, -process, -recede." Davis is a conductor of sound and meaning, precise to the syllable: a commanding talent in contemporary poetry.
Starred review from October 17, 2022
The lavish latest from Davis (after The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems) delivers poems of spitfire erudition. The sonnet form, rambunctiously reimagined, continues to be the poet’s favored, and few writing in English today do it as well as she: “the right words in the right order/ by instinct if you’re lucky.” With characteristically unfailing aim, the poet outsmarts her own expressions of dread, regret, nostalgia, and “joie de death”: “Lo, even as I sat in my under/ wear in brooklyn, in sweat and exist/ ential angst on a friday night so hot/ so wrong.” In one poem, she writes herself off (“i pronounce/ me done AF”), and then ridicules her poetic virtuosity, “so muscular your fucking sonnetry!” Among the book’s many muses, Berrigan (“it all lies there inside-out-/ him”) and Rilke are strong presences, as well as Keats, Bishop, and Kendrick Lamar. Letters to old lovers and recollected sexcapades interweave with poems about motherhood and the poet’s two grown children (“six feet tall/ malnourished sugar addicted” and “i/ bred and warned those would too soon replace me/ don’t join any organized sport fuck crying/ think only what you think no sophistry”). Readers will revel in poems at once astringent and salacious.