Blood, Tin, Straw

Blood, Tin, Straw

Summary

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.

Reviews

  • 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
    Library Journal

About the author

Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. The winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag's Leap, she is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the winner of many other awards and honours. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of Isidor Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more