SEPTEMBER 2022 - AudioFile
Sharon Olds is noted for the extent to which she exposes her inner world in her poetry, and this collection is no exception. The poems are intensely personal and sometimes extremely sexual, but never pornographic. They examine a woman in her 70s who is looking back to see how she got where she is; she is also mourning the death of the man who may prove to have been her last lover. Olds’s narration never threatens to distract from the text. Instead it leads listeners gently in a suggested direction—free to follow her or not. There is great sadness here but also a willingness to look to the future with guarded optimism. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
From the Publisher
GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE FINALIST
“A commanding poet . . . This substantial gathering is funny, furious, discomfiting, ravishing, mythic, and sorrowful . . . As always, Olds describes herself and her loved ones in startlingly microscopic detail, finding beauty in the ravages of age and even death . . . Passionately precise, Olds unites the primordial with the scientific, the mundane with the chthonic, flesh with spirit.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist
“A gorgeous, introspective collection. Beginning with a series of quarantine poems, she also meditates on her own white privilege, on her mother’s abuse, and on aging, among other subjects. At once personal and political, the book perfectly encapsulates this confounding time.” —Columbia Magazine
“Ranging from quarantine to issues of whiteness, the Pulitzer and T.S. Eliot Prize–winning Olds continues her laserlike attentiveness to the life around her life as she crisscrosses childhood, young adulthood, and contemporary times, sometimes in the style of Emily Dickinson.” —Library Journal
Library Journal
★ 11/04/2022
Ranging from family to mortality to social justice, the Pulitzer Prize—winning Olds (Stag's Leap) continues her laserlike attentiveness to the life around her life as she crisscrosses childhood, young adulthood, and contemporary times, particularly quarantine. "This morning when I woke up I had nothing,/ or I felt I had nothing, but I had something" she muses, and there are so many somethings in these relentlessly rich poems. Noting that "[my son] said I never/ told him anything about my family," she renders up painful moments of her mother and father, while adding "Three times in my life have I felt in my heart that I had value,/ three little fish"—her children, including "our baby who could not make it." Elsewhere, she recognizes that one partner will leave her and buries another. Whatever her griefs, she knows there are larger ones, that "we were born// of plenty, and ignorant of the fact." Recalling George Floyd's murder, she proclaims "May we eat the knowledge/ of suffering, may we eat the bitter/ waste of the false food we have/ fed others," demonstrating a fine ability to express social outrage without turning to polemic. Other poems discuss friends and family in Dickinson-like verse or reconfigured ballads, and a section of elegies ends "Love is the love of who we are, it is a form of knowing." VERDICT A visceral collection with the "I" and its center blazing and brave; highly recommended.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
SEPTEMBER 2022 - AudioFile
Sharon Olds is noted for the extent to which she exposes her inner world in her poetry, and this collection is no exception. The poems are intensely personal and sometimes extremely sexual, but never pornographic. They examine a woman in her 70s who is looking back to see how she got where she is; she is also mourning the death of the man who may prove to have been her last lover. Olds’s narration never threatens to distract from the text. Instead it leads listeners gently in a suggested direction—free to follow her or not. There is great sadness here but also a willingness to look to the future with guarded optimism. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
