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Overview
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 that will be familiar from earlier collections, each episode and memory burnished by the wisdom and grace and humor of looking back. In such poems as “Ode to My Sister,” “Ode of Broken Loyalty,” “Ode to My Whiteness,” “Blow Job Ode,” and “Ode to the Last Thirty-Eight Trees in New York City Visible from This Window,” Olds treats us to an intimate examination that, like all her work, is universal, by turns searing and charming in its honesty. From the bodily joys and sorrows of childhood to the deaths of those dearest to us, Olds shapes the world in language that is startlingly fresh, profound in its conclusions, and life-giving for the reader.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780451493644 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 09/20/2016 |
Pages: | 128 |
Sales rank: | 621,562 |
Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Winner of the 2016 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets
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 ten previous books of poetry and the winner of many other awards and honors, including the Wallace Stevens Award, 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. The Father was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and The Unswept Room was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. 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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Ode to the Hymen 3
1
Ode to the Clitoris 7
Ode to the Penis 8
Ode of Broken Loyalty 10
Wind Ode 11
Ode to My Whiteness 12
Amaryllis Ode 13
Ode to My Sister 14
2
Ode to the Condom 19
Ode to the Tampon 20
Hip Replacement Ode 21
Ode with a Silence in It 22
Ode to the Last Thirty-Eight Trees in New York City Visible from This Window 24
Ode to My Living Friends (January 2010) 26
Ode of Withered Cleavage 27
3
Ode to Menstrual Blood 31
Celibate's Ode to Balls 32
Ode to Thought 34
Secondary Boycott Ode 35
Legs Ode 36
Unmatching Legs Ode 38
Matching Ode 40
Ode of Girls' Things 42
4
Blow Job Ode 45
Ode to the Female Reproductive System 46
Sexist Ode 47
Spoon Ode 48
Ode to Buttermilk 49
Ode of the Corner I Was Stood In 50
Ode to the Creature from the Black Lagoon 51
5
Douche-Bag Ode 55
Single Lady's Ode 56
Ode to Whiskers 58
Split Ode 60
Ode of the Present Moment, in the Living Room, with Bianca 62
Stanley Kunitz Ode 64
Sheffield Mountain Ode 66
San Francisco Bay Dawn Ode 68
Sick Couch Ode 70
6
Victuals Dream Ode 75
Ode to the Word Vulva 76
Toxic Shock Ode 77
Ode to Wattles 78
Real Estate Ode 79
Ode to My Fat 80
My Mother's Flashlight Ode 81
Ode to Stretch Marks 82
Merkin Ode 84
Wild Ode 86
7
Ode for the Vagina 89
Ode to the Glans 90
Second Ode to the Hymen 91
Ode to a Composting Toilet 92
Ode to Dirt 94
Woodwind Ode 95
New England Camping Ode 96
Pine Tree Ode 98
Sloan Kettering Ode 99
Trilobite Ode 100
Double Ode for Hazel 102
Harmony Ode 105
O of Multiple O's 106
Donner Party Mother Ode 107
ABRACADABRA Ode 108