Poetry

 

And Her Soul Out Of Nothing
Olena Kalytiak Davis


Winner of the 1997 Brittingham Prize in Poetry,
Selected by Rita Dove

"And Her Soul Out of Nothing is, quite simply, unlike any other collection I can remember reading in recent literature. There is an eerie precision to her work—like the delicate discernment of a brain surgeon's scalpel—that renders each moment in both its absolute clarity and ultimate transitory fragility. Her language is quirky in the very best sense of that word; her use of syntax is brilliant."—Rita Dove, Judge, Citation for the 1997 Brittingham Prize in Poetry

"A treasury of broken meditations and chipped singing, moments of insight and yearning appearing like bits of statuary plowed up in a field, perhaps more beautiful for their sudden unlikely emergence. Olena Kalytiak Davis's poems find evidence of the spirit everywhere, in laundromats, in parking lots and frozen landscapes, in the panic of birds."
—Dean Young

This black and white photo of the poet Olena Kalytiak Davis shows a young woman in front of a garden lattice. Olena Kalytiak Davis, when this book was published, lived in Juneau, Alaska. A first-generation Ukrainian-American, she grew up in Detroit and has since lived in San Francisco, Prague, Lviv, Paris, Chicago, and the isolated Yup'ik community of Bethel, Alaska. She studied at Wayne State University, University of Michigan Law School, and Vermont College. She was the winner of the 1996 Rona Jaffe Writer's award, and her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 1995, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Michigan Quarterly Review, Field, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. This is her first book.

The cover of Olena's book is illustrated with a black and white photo of a nude woman lying on the sand, or on a grey nondiscript something. She is face down, in dispair or something fragile and unreachable.

October 1997
84 pp.   6 x 9
ISBN-10: 0-299-15714-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-299-15714-2  
Paper $14.95 t

The cloth edition, ISBN 0-299-15710-5, is out of print but the paperback is still available.

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