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Open Books: Events
January 28, 2010 07:30 PM
OLENA KALYTIAK DAVIS & KARY WAYSON
On the Kitchen Table From Which Everything Has Been Hastily Removed ($12.50) is the snappy title of Olena Kalytiak Davis’s recent chapbook. Her poems carry confession to wild, modern heights (mocking the lyrical "I" -- "'i'" knows 'i' is alone in her red truck") and to somber, classical depths (writing from the point of view of Francesca, an adulterer in Dante’s Inferno). Love and sex, the having, remembering, and losing of, is palpable here. Davis’s work seems nearly boundless, and self-aware enough to address the sadness inherent in that "nearly."
Kary Wayson’s first full-length collection, American Husband ($13.95 Ohio State) sparks with passion and cracklingly musical language. Love, lust, pain, self-deprecation ("silly thing, to feel / disheveled in front of a flower") all push her poems along at a wholly controlled, breakneck pace. Singular imagery complements her jazzy sound -- "The body’s a closet / with cats in the back. / The sea’s grown woolen / and white. I am / his considerable widow / now one syllable / bigger than wife."
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