monasterymonochrome 's review for:

Shattered Sonnets Love Cards and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities by Olena Kalytiak Davis

5.0

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Challenging, experimental and often purposefully, maddeningly impenetrable - but brilliant, nonetheless. I have to admit, I love words and sounds nearly as much as Davis seems to, though I'm not nearly so adept at letting them have free reign over my poems (to the point of suspending all sense of both narrative logic and traditional grammar rules) the way Davis does. For that reason, I find many of the poems in this collection incredibly admirable and brave. Not all of them make sense in any coherent way, which can be frustrating, but they're still such a delight to read and hear, and their impact is really all emotional anyway, in which case logic often doesn't come into the equation much at all. The ones that hit really hit, like "Dear Reader, Flannelled and Tulled," which is one of the most powerful opening poems I've ever come across. And the ones that don't quite manage to work as a whole are still fun and intriguing and whimsical in their own ways. I read Davis' first collection, And Her Soul Out of Nothing, a couple years ago and enjoyed it a lot but also remember it as incredibly different from the poems here, so maybe I need to go back to it at some point and search out the similarities. At any rate, I think this one affected me more immediately and forcefully, and I'll be thinking about it for a long time to come.