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  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409001287
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 128

Blood, Tin, Straw



The new collection from the major prize-winning poet.

Sharon Olds divides this new book into five sections - 'Blood', 'Tin', ' 'Straw', ' 'Fire' and 'Light' - each made up of fourteen poems whose dominant imagery is drawn from one of these elements. The poems are rooted in different moments of an ordinary life and weave back and forth in time. Each section suggests the progression of the making of a soul cleansed by blood, forged by fire, suffused by light.

Unafraid to confront the ecstatic or the brutal side of a woman's experience, Sharon Olds transforms the subjects with an alchemist's art, using language that is alternately casual and startling, fierce and transcendent. This is an intensely moving collection by one of America's finest poets.

  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409001287
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 128

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.

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Praise for Blood, Tin, Straw

Her sixth book [Blood, Tin, Straw] is without doubt her strongest... Olds' trademark has long been her astonishing candour... and this quality is firmly in place here, but she has added to it a new strength and lyricism of metaphor and image. The shock she delivers is that of true poetry

Library Journal

Olds has always been a daring poet of the flesh, but now in Blood, Tin, Straw, a major work, she embraces the entire universe... Olds writes more forthrightly about female sexuality - the hunger, blood, tensility and heat of it - than any of her sister poets. This collection is poetry as memoir, mined from the very core of her being

Booklist

Olds remains too little-known in the UK... readers new to her will be astounded

Independent

Sharon Olds' poems are pure fire in the hands... I love the toughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss

Michael Ondaatje
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