The University of Wisconsin Press

Poetry


 

And Her Soul Out Of Nothing
Olena Kalytiak Davis


The Brittingham Prize in Poetry
Ronald Wallace, General Editor

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 lives 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.

Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)

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.

April 1994
LC: 97-015599 PS
84 pp.    6 x 9

Book icon
 Paper $14.95 t
ISBN 978-0-299-15714-2
Shopping cart ADD TO CART
   

Home | Books | Journals | Events | Textbooks | Authors | Related | Search | Order | Contact

If you have trouble accessing any page in this web site, contact our Web manager.
E-mail: webmaster@uwpress.wisc.edu.

Updated June 27, 2011

© 2010, The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System