Balladz

By: Sharon Olds

Narrated by: Sharon Olds

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • Songs from our era of communal grief and reckoning—by the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner, called "a poet for these times, a powerful woman who won’t back down" (San Francisco Chronicle).

"At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror," writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating volume, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, and at its center boasts what she calls Amherst Balladz (whose syntax honors Emily Dickinson: "she was our Girl - our Woman - / Man enough - for me") and many more in her own contemporary, long-flowing-sentence rhythm. Olds sings of her childhood, young womanhood, and maturity all mixed up together, seeing an early lover in the one who is about to buried; seeing her whiteness, seeing her privilege; seeing her mother (whom her readers will recognize) "flushed exalted at Punishment time"; seeing how we've spoiled the earth but carrying a stray indoor spider carefully back out to the garden.

It is Olds's gift to us that in the richly detailed exposure of her sorrows she can still elegize songbirds, her true kin, and write that heaven comes here in life, not after it.

Critic reviews

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

Intimate!

I feel as though I know her more than ever. Her voice is stronger than ever.