The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems

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.” [em](Oct.) [/em]