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Balladz
  • Published: 12 January 2023
  • ISBN: 9781787334229
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $37.99
Categories:

Balladz

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Arguably America's greatest living poet, Sharon Olds enters her eightieth year with a book for our times: a book of fear, fragility and love of life

***NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST***
***AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023***

'Sharon Olds is a force of nature... She proves triumphantly evergreen'
OBSERVER

'At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror,' writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating collection, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, followed by her 'Amherst Balladz', honouring Emily Dickinson - 'she was our Girl - our Woman - / Man enough - for me' - and leads to celebrations of lost friends and lovers: her childhood, young womanhood, and old age all mixed up together. She examines her white privilege, sees her mother 'flushed and exalted at punishment time', celebrates the human body, even in ageing, and looks with wonder at the natural world and how we've spoiled it.

Renowned for her poetry of searing honesty, sexual frankness and brave originality, Sharon Olds' new book emerges 'at the eleventh hour of the end of the world', from the time of plague, this time of loss, where she can look at the world and her life and tell us plainly 'love is the love of who we are, it is a form of knowing.'
  • Published: 12 January 2023
  • ISBN: 9781787334229
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $37.99
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

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

Praise for Balladz

A brilliant and fearless poet.

Joyce Carol Oates, author of Black Water

Olds is a supreme poet of the body; I'll be reading her till I die.

Fiona Benson, author of Ephemeron

Perhaps the most accessible poet of her generation.

Telegraph

In Balladz, Sharon Olds proves triumphantly evergreen: a woman who still steps across prudishly conventional lines as playfully as a child absorbed in French skipping... Remarkable.

Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month*

Balladz showcases the range of Sharon Olds... The whole collection follows the fragility of life, the acceptance of aging, and the reckoning of America.

Electric Lit, *Favourite Poetry Collections of 2022*

Her voice is easy and intimate, almost alarmingly charming, and so you will follow wherever she leads... Olds's artistic signature - what really makes Sharon Olds Sharon Olds - is a kind of aggressive intimacy: a willingness to write.

New York Times

Drawing on an unflinching interrogation of the self, these poems pulse with energy.

Guardian

Always fearlessly focused on the body and sensual experience, Olds getting older just finds new worlds of taboo to conquer... Astonishing.

Sunday Times

Sharon Olds is a force of nature. It seems phenomenal that, at 81, she produced this collection about sex, love and the landscape of the body that seems to have been written with the fearlessness of youth.

Observer, *Books of the Year*