The Poem She Didn't Write and Other Poems

September 15, 2014
In this long-awaited follow-up to 2003’s Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities (which is being reissued alongside this collection), Davis crafts a postconfessional, lyric “I,” charting a fresh path that remains respectful of poetic traditions. In taking on some of the most common poetic tropes and subjects (and regularly referencing the canon more broadly), Davis startles with shifting syntax and punctuation, making new forms from the old. She concludes one sonnet with the couplet, “here (this) my wicked rest: i scribes this text./ “i” blithely rhymed: fuck! All... is aural sex,” and saucily declares that “the new style is the old style: from behind.” As the work progresses, Davis toys with the notions of joy and sorrow, making both emotions newly understandable in the poet’s unique worldview. While not every piece rises to the level of the best poems in the collection, Davis offers readers plenty to linger over. Fertile and funny, her poems combine intellect and craft to reshape even the most ordinary tropes into something entirely surprising—e.g., “My geranium is better than all of summer/ she does not need a new lover, yet// there is nothing yellow about her/ she’s thinking about death.”

October 1, 2014
Davis' first full collection in a decade should be stamped with the warning, Buckle up!, because entering this writer's mind is one wild ride of digression, mutation, and syntactical and typographical experimentation. It is fascinating to encounter poems that, say, pay homage to the aubade, or Robert Lowell, then run off in snippets of thought or feeling, heading one way, circling back, and tying the reader in knots. Many poems prove excellent mental fodder or, at least, reflect the poet's playful exuberance for life and language. Davis has clearly put the poetic rule book through a shredder, and there's much to appreciate about that. Sometimes, as in the sonnets/antisonnets threaded through the collection and in such poems as The Lyric I' Drives to Pick up Her Children from School: A Poem in the Postconfessional Mode, she succeeds brilliantly. At other times, as in Late-Night Poemcall and Methow: 19:19, there's a sense that maybe some ideas shouldn't have been indulged. But breaking ground, as Davis does, is serious business, requiring the courage to go where others won't dare.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)