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Staff Pick
Once I rode the bus with Sharon Olds, and she was as her poems are — friendly, conversational, painstakingly honest, and wisely humorous too. Her work gave me permission to tell whoever would listen that I had something to say, just an ordinary human on an ordinary day. And so I wrote and published poems and now I can say, thank you, Sharon. Read her poetry and you too will be changed. Recommended By Marianne T, Powells.com
Sharon Olds is one of the most prestigious and critically acclaimed living American poets today, and her latest collection (her 15th!), Arias, contains some of her strongest, most distinct verse to date. Ranging in subject from birth to the modern TV to language itself, Olds illuminates the universal through the particular. Recommended By Lucinda G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Following her recent Odes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet gives us radical new poems of intimate life and political conscience, of race and class and a mother's violence.
The atom bomb, Breaking Bad, Rasputin, the cervix, 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 harmonics and moral logic, as Olds stands center stage to sing of sexual pleasure 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 reader.
Review
"A riot of quirkiness and eccentricity, and the mood of the book, which shifts from droll humor to melancholy to gentle vulnerability, is unclassifiable — and just right." Kirkus
Review
"In Arias, Olds puts her honest, clear verse to work mostly outside of the body, and looks instead at the body politic, at the social body we have created or destroyed together." New York Journal of Books
Review
"[Olds] bring[s] the immensity of the world's hurt to an intimate human level, not to simplify it but to both concentrate it and to find its odd joys. Arias offers hard-earned comfort well worth the effort." Booklist
Review
"Arias is rich with its own music . . . Olds offers gripping, vivid songs that urgently capture the preciousness of what there remains on Earth to defend, and all that has been lost . . . In [these] complex, nourishing poems, the stakes are clear: if we are on Earth, we ought to be singing." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Olds has the goods in this eclectic collection of new verse . . . With its expansive range and warm honesty, this book shows us why the Pulitzer Prize winner is still among the most beloved poets alive." BuzzFeed
About the Author
SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. The winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and England's T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag's Leap, she is the author of eleven previous books of poetry and the winner of many other honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Dead and the Living. 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 Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City.