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Title details for Balladz by Sharon Olds - Wait list

Balladz

by Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds
Audiobook
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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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    October 4, 2022

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593627617
      • File size: 102624 KB
      • Duration: 03:33:47

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      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

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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