Hello, everyone.
And our first reader tonight is Olena Kalytiak.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, my name, my last name is Zuzga.
So it's okay.
Olena Kalytiak Davis.
Olena comes to us from Alaska, and she currently
lives in Anchorage.
Her writing is not about Alaska.
In fact, one of her poems dismisses it,
stating simply that the Aurora Borealis is boring.
But the leaping sounds and associations of her work
compel me to note the fact that Alaska and Arizona both share
A's at their beginnings and ends.
I don't know if Olena has been to Alabama,
but Alabama has four As like Olena's name.
And, of course, ends it begins with an A. Anyway, Olena,
welcome to Arizona.
Ole.
[LAUGHTER]
Olena is a Virgo and was born in the year of the rabbit.
It's true.
[LAUGHTER]
She is a first generation Ukrainian American.
She has been to law school and has passed two bar exams.
Her work has been included in three volumes
of the Best American Poetry, 1995, 2000, and 2001.
Her first book, "And Her Soul Out of Nothing,"
was selected by Rita Dove for the Brittingham Prize
for poetry in 1997 and published by the University of Wisconsin
Press.
Six years and two children later,
"Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, & Other Off
& Backhanded Importunities" has just
been published by Bloomsbury Tin House Books.
Olena's first book is a meditative, syntactically
complex book that posits and peruses
the surfaces of an elusive gong soul.
Her second book opens into a pirate ship
of words, careening iridescent night feathered talking birds
surround you.
You'll see this happen.
A ferocious and dynamic selfhood demands its place
and claims the English language for and to itself,
or rather a kaleidoscopic electric language
allows an explosion of being to form itself
into an individual voice.
In Olena's poems, everything tugs and somersaults
into itself.
Rhyme leads the poems across borders through hidden doors,
words and phrases chant and shift shape turning inside out.
Think of two Sesame Street monsters
who come across a broken word, sounding it out,
putting it together.
There is much counting in her book also.
On the Earth Day, one is not only
say 37, but also five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 20, 30,
35, 37 years old.
And teeth are everywhere in these poems.
Teeth and a voice, two things that
emerge in a child's mouth around the same time.
In the acknowledgments to her new book,
Olena notes the many journals where
her work has appeared, thanks various editors and readers.
And then there is a shout out to her kids,
just their first names with exclamation points,
Avgustyn! Olyana! Olena's work fuses an adult's range
of relationship and reading with a child's spatial exploration
of the new possibilities of language.
These are words for the mouth, for the tongue finding itself
anew against the teeth.
Olena Kalytiak Davis.
[APPLAUSE]