Arias

A frank and exhilarating book by one of the most powerful confessional poets.

Sharon Olds goes where many poets would fear to tread and others not dream of treading. Like a curious child, she wanders past No Entry signs on to private land… Arias is a phenomenal achievement, the most moving collection of her career, the most open of books.

On my Christmas list? Sharon Olds’s Arias. Olds is a supreme poet of the body; I’ll be reading her till I die.

A generous collection… sexy, pained, conversational, always bringing the reader along for the ride.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 T. S. ELIOT PRIZE* 
 
Following her recent Odes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet gives us a new collection of poems that sing of a woman’s intimate life and political conscience. The atom bomb, Breaking Bad, the cervix, Trayvon Martin, her mother’s return from the dead: the peerless Sharon Olds once again takes up subject matter that is both difficult and ordinary, elusive and everywhere. 
 
 Each aria is shaped by its unique melody and moral logic, as Olds stands centre stage to account for her own late romance and chance wisdom, and faces the tragic life of our nation and our planet. ‘I cannot say I did not ask / to be born,’ begins one aria, which considers how, with what actions, with what thirst, we each ask for a turn, and receive our portion on earth. Olds delivers these pieces with all the passion, anguish, and solo force that make a great performance, in the process enlarging the soul of her readers. 
 
 ‘Olds is a supreme poet of the body; I’ll be reading her till I die’ Fiona Benson

Your Family, Your Body

Penguin Modern Poets 3

The latest volume in Penguin Modern Poets series - moving and unflinchingly honest poems from three different cultures about experiences of the female body, the family, sexual politics and conflict 
 
Your Family, Your Body features the work of Malika Booker, the Guyanese-British writer and performer behind London- and Chicago-based collective Malika's Kitchen; the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sharon Olds, one of America's most brilliant, beloved and candid voices; and Warsan Shire, the award-winning poet and first ever Young Poetry Laureate of London who also lent her words to Beyoncé's visual album Lemonade. 
 
Inspired by Penguin's enormously successful '60s series of the same name, the Penguin Modern Poets are succinct, collectible, lovingly-assembled guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry, from the UK, America and beyond. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the seasoned poetry fan and the curious reader alike to encounter our most exciting new voices.

'Contemporary poetry has been given a shot in the arm by the relaunch of Penguin Modern Poets ... deep and funny, and sometimes both at once'

Malika Booker (Author) Malika Booker is a British writer of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. Her pamphlet, Breadfruit, was published by flipped eye in 2007, and her Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize-winning collection, Pepper Seed, followed in 2013 from Peepal Tree. She has written for the stage and radio. She was the first Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Sharon Olds (Author) Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco. She was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1998 to 2000 and currently teaches at New York University. She has been involved with outreach writing workshops at hospitals for the physically challenged and for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Her last collection, Stag's Leap, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. Warsan Shire (Author) Warsan Shire is a Somali-British poet. She is the author of two poetry pamphlets, Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth (2011) and Her Blue Body (2015). In 2014 she was appointed as the inaugural Young Poet Laureate of London. In 2016 she collaborated on the film adaptation and poetry for Beyoncé Knowles-Carter's visual album Lemonade. She is currently working on her first full collection of poetry.

Inspired by Penguin's enormously successful '60s series of the same name, the Penguin Modern Poets are succinct, collectible, lovingly-assembled guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry, from the UK, America and beyond. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the seasoned poetry fan and the curious reader alike to encounter our most exciting new voices. 
 
Volume 3, Your Family, Your Body, features the work of Malika Booker, the Guyanese-British writer and performer behind London- and Chicago-based collective Malika's Kitchen; the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sharon Olds, one of America's most brilliant, beloved and candid voices; and Warsan Shire, the poet who lent her words to Beyoncé's visual album Lemonade.

Odes

The provocative and moving follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling Stag’s Leap 
 
‘Interspersed with acts of breathtaking linguistic daring.’ 
Charlotte Mendelson, Observer Book of the Year

Olds’s descriptive gift is like a fire hose of frankness…undeniably powerful.

Olds’s inspired new collection alerts us to taboos we barely think about ordinarily…These odes, because they illuminate what it is to live inside a body and survive its outrages, are useful – and beautiful too.

[An] inspired new collection… She writes…with a driven perkiness… Throughout, there is a bold sexiness that goes beyond sex, that borders on camp, fey or funny… Marvellous odes… Beautiful.

[It is] interspersed with acts of breathtaking linguistic daring.

Her new collection, Odes, is an exquisite follow up [to Stag’s Leap.]

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco, educated at Stanford and Columbia universities, and has lived for numerous years in New York City. Her books have won many awards over the years. Her last collection, Stag’s Leap, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize.

‘Interspersed with acts of breathtaking linguistic daring.’ 
Charlotte Mendelson, Observer Book of the Year 
 
Opening with a powerful and tender ‘Ode to the Hymen’, Sharon Olds uses this age-old poetic form to address many aspects of herself, in a collection that is centred around the female body and female pleasures, and touches along the way on parts of her own story which will be familiar from earlier works, each episode and memory now burnished by the wisdom and grace of looking back. In such poems as ‘Ode to My Sister’, ‘Ode of Broken Loyalty’, ‘Ode to My Whiteness’, ‘Blow Job Ode’, ‘Ode to the Last 38 Trees in New York City Visible from This Window’, Olds treats us to an intimate self-examination that, like all her work, is universal and by turns searing and charming in its honesty. From the early bodily joys and sorrows of her girlhood to the recent deaths of those dearest to her – the ‘Sheffield Mountain Ode’ for Galway Kinnell is one of the most stunning pieces here – Olds shapes her world in language that is startlingly fresh, profound in its conclusions, and life-giving for the reader.

Stag's Leap

In this emotional new collection from 'America's greatest living poet', Sharon Olds lays bare her divorce and the bones of lost love - her most powerful collection yet and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and T.S. Eliot Prize.

Sharon Olds, the winner of the 2012 TS Eliot Prize for Stag’s Leap, is the first female American Poet to win the prize, and perhaps the most accessible poet of her generation.

Olds, who has always had a gift for describing intimacy, has, in a sense, had these poems thrown at her by life and allowed them to take root: they are stunning – the best of a formidable career.

A tremendous book of grace and gallantry which crowns the career of a world-class poet.

[It] amazed me...great, heartfelt, monumental book.

Each image of Sharon Olds' searing Stag's Leap brands itself on retina and heart - how will I ever forget the "Tiny Siren" found by accident in the washing machine?

The most powerful piece of writing I've encountered in decades... The raw emotion of break up transcends every known cliché thanks to her generosity of spirit and the awe-inspiring choreography of her language.

I read this poetry collection with my heart in my mouth.

I treasure this collection of poems: so beautiful, so personal, so revolutionary. Every time I return to this book I find a line, a stanza that I understand better, differently, appreciate just a little more.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize 
 
Stag's Leap, Sharon Olds' stunningly poignant new sequence of poems, tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. In this wise and intimate telling - which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending - Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love's sight; the surprising physical passion that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband's smile to the set of his hip. 
 
Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable title poem, 'When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver'. 
 
Olds' propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music - sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.

The Wellspring

A bold and intimate collection from the winner of the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize and one of America's most popular poets.

Sentences roll on with breathless urgency, and the emotional pace of these unstoppered utterances is remarkably effective... Visceral in detail and unsparingly honest in its psychology, the volume offers a tenderness and integrity which allow even the more shockingly erotic or confessional moments to say something about innocence

Sharon Olds' poems are pure fire in the hands - risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the toughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss

Her best work exhibits a lyrical acuity which is both purifying and redemptive. She sees description as a means to catharsis, and the result is impossible to forget...her poetry is remarkable for its candour, its eroticism and its power to move

This, surely, is the sound the confessional hordes have been trying to utter since Lowell, the right road that is missed so easily

Over the last five years, Sharon Olds' poetry has become widely read and celebrated in Britain. Frank and exhilarating, sensual and profound, the poems stare, unblinking, at sex and death and love - showing these things to us in all their raw beauty. 
 
This striking new collection is a sequence of poems that reaches into the very wellspring of life. The poems take us back to the womb, to childhood, to a searing sexual awakening, to the shock of birth, the wonder and humour of parenthood - and finally to the depths of adult love. 
 
Always bold, musical and honest, The Wellspring plunges us into the essence of experience. This is a highly charged, sinuous, passionate book from one of the finest poets writing today.

Blood, Tin, Straw

The new collection from the major prize-winning poet.

Her sixth book [Blood, Tin, Straw] is without doubt her strongest... Olds' trademark has long been her astonishing candour... and this quality is firmly in place here, but she has added to it a new strength and lyricism of metaphor and image. The shock she delivers is that of true poetry

Olds has always been a daring poet of the flesh, but now in Blood, Tin, Straw, a major work, she embraces the entire universe... Olds writes more forthrightly about female sexuality - the hunger, blood, tensility and heat of it - than any of her sister poets. This collection is poetry as memoir, mined from the very core of her being

Olds remains too little-known in the UK... readers new to her will be astounded

Sharon Olds' poems are pure fire in the hands... I love the toughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss

Sharon Olds divides this new book into five sections - 'Blood', 'Tin', ' 'Straw', ' 'Fire' and 'Light' - each made up of fourteen poems whose dominant imagery is drawn from one of these elements. The poems are rooted in different moments of an ordinary life and weave back and forth in time. Each section suggests the progression of the making of a soul cleansed by blood, forged by fire, suffused by light. 
 
Unafraid to confront the ecstatic or the brutal side of a woman's experience, Sharon Olds transforms the subjects with an alchemist's art, using language that is alternately casual and startling, fierce and transcendent. This is an intensely moving collection by one of America's finest poets.

One Secret Thing

A stunning collection of poems focusing on the emotions involved in family life from the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

Sharon Olds's poems are pure fire in the hands - risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the roughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss

As devastatingly accurate in its depiction of our deepest wishes and secret inner lives as we have come to expect from this brilliant and fearless poet

Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year

Her best work exhibits a lyrical acuity which is both purifying and redemptive. She sees description as a means to catharsis, and the result is impossible to forget... Sharon Olds is enormously self-aware; her poetry is remarkable for its candour, its eroticism, and its power to move

She has written without embarassment or apology, with remarkable passion and savagery and nerve, poems about family and family pathology, early erotic fascination and sexual life inside marriage

Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony. 
 
The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humour, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy - sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and danger - public and private - illuminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revision, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon Olds's characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power.

Selected Poems

The new Selected Poems from the bestselling winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

Her best work exhibits a lyrical acuity which is both purifying and redemptive. She sees description as a means to catharsis, and the end result is impossible to forget... Her poetry is remarkable for its candour, its eroticism, and its power to move

Olds remains too little-known in the UK...readers new to her will be astounded

If any reading is 'essential', this is it

Sharon Olds explores her own experience with an intransigent honesty and fiery dignity. The reader might flinch at the intimacy, but Olds strikes straight out for the truth

The attention to line, the superbly focused detail, the way her autobiographical detail strikes, shines, deepens, spreads: this, surely is the sound the confessional hordes have been trying to utter since Lowell, the right road that is missed so easily

Sharon Olds' poems are pure fire in the hands - risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the toughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion of her work

Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds's poetry 'pure fire in the hands' and cheered the 'roughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss'. This rich selection - made by the author - exhibits those qualities in poem after poem, reflecting, moreover, an exciting experimentation with rhythm and language and a movement toward an embrace beyond the personal. Subjects are revisited - the pain of childhood, adolescent sexual stirrings, the fulfilment of marriage, the wonder of children - but each re-casting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions and conceits. 
 
A powerful distillation of the best work from one of America's most gifted and widely read poets, drawn from her seven published volumes, this is a testament to a remarkable writer's depth, range and continuing development.

The Unswept Room

'Sharon Old's poems are pure fire in the hands... I love the toughness and humour and brag and tenderness and comletion in her work' - Michael Ondaatje

Her best work exhibits a lyrical acuity which is both purifying and redemptive. She sees description as a means to catharsis, and the end result is impossible to forget - her poetry is remarkable for its candour, its eroticism, and its power to move

The attention to line, the superbly focused detail, the way her autobiographical material strikes, shines, deepens, spreads: this, surely, is the sound the confessional hordes have been trying to utter since Lowell, the right road that is missed so easily

The Unswept Room is a dazzling collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and rhythm, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humour. From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation of children and the transformative power of marital love, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical and emotional sensations seldom confronted in poetry. 
 
These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imaginations with unexpected word play, sprung rhythms and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us her finest collection.

Sharon Olds

In Balladz, Sharon Olds proves triumphantly evergreen: a woman who still steps across prudishly conventional lines as playfully as a child absorbed in French skipping... Remarkable.

Perhaps the most accessible poet of her generation.

Her voice is easy and intimate, almost alarmingly charming, and so you will follow wherever she leads... Olds's artistic signature - what really makes Sharon Olds Sharon Olds - is a kind of aggressive intimacy: a willingness to write.

Sharon Olds is a force of nature. It seems phenomenal that, at 81, she produced this collection about sex, love and the landscape of the body that seems to have been written with the fearlessness of youth.

Always fearlessly focused on the body and sensual experience, Olds getting older just finds new worlds of taboo to conquer... Astonishing.

Olds is a supreme poet of the body; I'll be reading her till I die.

Drawing on an unflinching interrogation of the self, these poems pulse with energy.

Balladz showcases the range of Sharon Olds... The whole collection follows the fragility of life, the acceptance of aging, and the reckoning of America.

Electric Lit, *Favourite Poetry Collections of 2022*

Arguably America's greatest living poet, Sharon Olds enters her eightieth year with a book for our times: a book of fear, fragility and love of life 
 
***NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST*** 
***AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*** 
 
'Sharon Olds is a force of nature... She proves triumphantly evergreen' 
OBSERVER 
 
'At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror,' writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating collection, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, followed by her 'Amherst Balladz', honouring Emily Dickinson - 'she was our Girl - our Woman - / Man enough - for me' - and leads to celebrations of lost friends and lovers: her childhood, young womanhood, and old age all mixed up together. She examines her white privilege, sees her mother 'flushed and exalted at punishment time', celebrates the human body, even in ageing, and looks with wonder at the natural world and how we've spoiled it. 
 
Renowned for her poetry of searing honesty, sexual frankness and brave originality, Sharon Olds' new book emerges 'at the eleventh hour of the end of the world', from the time of plague, this time of loss, where she can look at the world and her life and tell us plainly 'love is the love of who we are, it is a form of knowing.'

Sharon Olds

Praise for Balladz

**In Balladz, Sharon Olds proves triumphantly evergreen: a woman who still steps across prudishly conventional lines as playfully as a child absorbed in French skipping... Remarkable.**

Perhaps the most accessible poet of her generation.

Her voice is easy and intimate, almost alarmingly charming, and so you will follow wherever she leads... Olds's artistic signature - what really makes Sharon Olds Sharon Olds - is a kind of aggressi ...

**In Balladz, Sharon Olds proves triumphantly evergreen: a woman who still steps across prudishly conventional lines as playfully as a child absorbed in French skipping... Remarkable.**

Perhaps the most accessible poet of her generation.

Her voice is easy and intimate, almost alarmingly charming, and so you will follow wherever she leads... Olds's artistic signature - what really makes Sharon Olds Sharon Olds - is a kind of aggressi ...

**In Balladz, Sharon Olds proves triumphantly evergreen: a woman who still steps across prudishly conventional lines as playfully as a child absorbed in French skipping... Remarkable.**

Perhaps the most accessible poet of her generation.

Her voice is easy and intimate, almost alarmingly charming, and so you will follow wherever she leads... Olds's artistic signature - what really makes Sharon Olds Sharon Olds - is a kind of aggressi ...

Books by Sharon Olds

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