The Poem She Didn't Write and Other Poems

Honored as one of "Nine Great Poetry Books of the Year" by The New Yorker.

"The Poem She Didn't Write is a breakup book, full of the kinds of invective and taunts honed by a person who has spent, as all of us have now spent, infinite hours online. Its complex tones arise from the poet's wanting equally to seduce and to repel a lover whose deepening silence only provokes rhetorical escalation." —Dan Chaisson, The New Yorker

"Davis's 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." —Booklist

Olena Kalytiak Davis revivifies language as she addresses, with a heightened post-confessional directness, lost love, sexual violence, and the confrontations of aging. With her characteristic syntactical play, sly slips of meaning, and all-out feminism, Davis hyper-consciously erases the rulebook.

From "Not This":

my god all the days we have lived thru
saying

not this
one, not this,
not now,
not yet, this week
doesn't count, was lost, this month
was shit, what a year, it sucked,
it flew, that decade was for
what? i raised my kids, they
grew i lost two pasts . . .

Olena Kalyiak Davis is a first-generation Ukrainian-American who was born and raised in Detroit. Educated at Wayne State University, the University of Michigan Law School, and Vermont College, she is the author of three books of poetry and currently works as a lawyer in Anchorage, Alaska.