Sharon Olds

"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"--

Looking at the interrelationships among family members, this collection of poetry examines the traumas of childhood, the estrangement between mother and daughter, and the transformative power of marital love and motherhood.

Poems on love and the family. In The Planned Child, she writes: "I hated the fact that they planned me ... made a chart of the month and put / her temperature on it, rising and falling, / to know the day to make me--I would have / liked to have been conceived in heat, / in haste, by mistake, in love, in sex, / not on cardboard, the little x on the / rising line that did not fall again." "Sharon Old's dazzling new collection is a sequence of poems...

A powerful collection from one of our most gifted and widely read poets- 117 of her finest poems drawn from her seven published volumes. Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds' s poetry " pure fire in the hands" and cheered the " roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss." This rich selection exhibits those qualities in poem after poem, reflecting, moreover,...

"Following the Pulitzer prize-winning collection Stag's Leap, Sharon Olds gives us a stunning book of odes. Opening with the powerful and tender "Ode to the Hymen," Olds addresses and embodies, in this age-old poetic form, many aspects of love and gender and sexual politics in a collection that is centered on the body and its structures and pleasures. The poems extend parts of her narrative as a daughter, mother, wife, lover, friend, and poet of conscience...