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Odes
  • Published: 8 September 2016
  • ISBN: 9781473546301
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 128
Categories:

Odes

Formats & editions
EBook
8 Sept 2016
Tr. Paperback
15 Sept 2016
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The provocative and moving follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling Stag’s Leap

‘Interspersed with acts of breathtaking linguistic daring.’
Charlotte Mendelson, Observer Book of the Year

‘Interspersed with acts of breathtaking linguistic daring.’
Charlotte Mendelson, Observer Book of the Year

Opening with a powerful and tender ‘Ode to the Hymen’, Sharon Olds uses this age-old poetic form to address many aspects of herself, in a collection that is centred around the female body and female pleasures, and touches along the way on parts of her own story which will be familiar from earlier works, each episode and memory now burnished by the wisdom and grace of looking back. In such poems as ‘Ode to My Sister’, ‘Ode of Broken Loyalty’, ‘Ode to My Whiteness’, ‘Blow Job Ode’, ‘Ode to the Last 38 Trees in New York City Visible from This Window’, Olds treats us to an intimate self-examination that, like all her work, is universal and by turns searing and charming in its honesty. From the early bodily joys and sorrows of her girlhood to the recent deaths of those dearest to her – the ‘Sheffield Mountain Ode’ for Galway Kinnell is one of the most stunning pieces here – Olds shapes her world in language that is startlingly fresh, profound in its conclusions, and life-giving for the reader.
  • Published: 8 September 2016
  • ISBN: 9781473546301
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 128
Categories:

About the author

Sharon Olds

SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the recipient of the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement, as well as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the UK’s T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag’s Leap. She is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the recipient of many other awards and honors, including the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first book, Satan Says (1980), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second, The Dead and the Living, which was also the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of the former S. S. Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City.
portrait photo of Sharon Olds

Also by Sharon Olds

Balladz
Arias
Penguin Modern Poets 3
Stag's Leap
One Secret Thing
Selected Poems
The Unswept Room
See all

Praise for Odes

Olds’s descriptive gift is like a fire hose of frankness…undeniably powerful.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sunday Times

Olds’s inspired new collection alerts us to taboos we barely think about ordinarily…These odes, because they illuminate what it is to live inside a body and survive its outrages, are useful – and beautiful too.

Kate Kellaway, Guardian

[An] inspired new collection… She writes…with a driven perkiness… Throughout, there is a bold sexiness that goes beyond sex, that borders on camp, fey or funny… Marvellous odes… Beautiful.

Kate Kellaway, Guardian Weekly

[It is] interspersed with acts of breathtaking linguistic daring.

Charlotte Mendelson, Observer, Book of the Year

Her new collection, Odes, is an exquisite follow up [to Stag’s Leap.]

Daily Telegraph