Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities

Rating:
Summary: Somewhat Disappointing
Review: Davis' first book is arguably one of the best first books of poetry published in the last decade. Unfortunately, Davis' new collection is a let down. The keen sense of conveying emotional resonance is still here, but the work has become sloppier in the name of becoming more experimental. Many of these poems are downright trite. I will keep reading Davis' poems. And I hope the next book is as stunning as her first.

Rating:
Summary: cake is good!
Review: If, as the reviewer from Asheville, NC contends, Ms. Kalytiak-Davis's latest book is "cake", then let us eat cake, and let it be our new daily bread. This "cake" combines the recipes of old (Dickinson, Yeats, Plath, etc.)with something altogether new (and secret) to create an intoxicating concoction that is both rich and dense--allowing us to become satiated and yet still pine for the crumbs... To be fair, one should go back and read Dickinson, Yeats, Plath, Hopkins, etc., then re-read Kalytiak-Davis. One will then find that hope is not the thing with feathers that perches in your soul, it is the enigmatic, unimpressionable, insensible thing that hides like a prize in the center of the cake, providing the perfect tether between ego and reason, illusion and truth, and wrack and redemption.

Rating:
Summary: (w)rack and red(empti)on
Review: Somewhere between a teen girl's love diary and a madwoman-in-the-attic's antics and a transcript of an autistic's mental music, there is this book: a decadent sublime that's about as gorgeous and bankrupt as Marie Antoinette's soon-to-be-guillotined head. One thing about the book is clear enough: there is an authentic and maudlin core of emotion that's invested in love, its betrayals, its derangements, its tender vulnerabilities. But this sincere center is so overlaid with ironies and mockeries and allusions and cageyness that the book becomes an exercise in solipsistic postures, narcissistic cake-eating. Now Plath, now Berryman, now Dickinson, now Shakespeare, now Williams--the poems sample these poets and more, as though to suggest that the tomfooleries of the project at hand were somehow aligned with the graver dangers these poets' poems faced and sang from. But the samplings are just that: samplings, embedded into poems so coy and hip they make you feel like a schmuck for not having more greasy-haired pinings for some vague love and a confident command of how to allude to the poems in the Norton Anthology. If you want the real thing, go back to Plath, to Berryman, to Dickinson, to Hopkins, etc. This book may use the f-word a couple dozen times, but in the end it's still just cake.