Download or read book Understanding Sharon Olds written by Russell Brickey and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2016-11-30 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thorough examination of the author's deeply personal and often-controversial poetry Understanding Sharon Olds explores this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's major themes, characters, life, and career, including her often-controversial portrayals of family dysfunction, sexuality, and violence against women. In this first book dedicated entirely to the poetry of Sharon Olds, Russell Brickey examines how Olds approaches these difficult and complex topics with pathos and intimate, sometimes provocatively private, details through poetry that not all her critics appreciate. Olds has never shied away from difficult subject matter. Her first award-winning book, Satan Says, is a feminist exploration of gender politics and adolescent discovery. The Father comprises a book-length elegy about cancer. Stag's Leap, Olds's Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, is a surprisingly tender look at divorce in modern American culture. Extremely personal, her poems often deal with the victories and contradictions of being a woman in the United States during a time when the country is often involved in racial upheavals and military conflicts overseas. She investigates the victories and contradictions of being a wife and mother during the era of feminism, as one of our most honest, most overt poets of female sexuality and its relationship to family life and its place within the history of humanity. Brickey organizes each chapter around a theme or a persona within Olds's cast of characters. These include poems dedicated to mothers, fathers, children, and the arc of history. Through his close readings, Brickey shows how and where Olds has expanded the tradition of confessional poetry (literature that deals with psychology, family, love, and sexuality), a term Olds disdains but nevertheless expanded into commentary about the human condition in all its paradoxes.
Download or read book Stag s Leap written by Sharon Olds and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poignant sequence of poems traces the evolution of a divorce while exploring themes of love, sex, sorrow, memory and freedom as reflected by everyday familiarities and the poignancy of former lovers parting, in a collection by the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of The Dead and the Living.
Download or read book The Father written by Sharon Olds and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-12-05 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searing sequence of poems about a daughter’s vision of a father’s illness and death—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). The Father chronicles these events in a connected narrative, from the onset of the illness to reflections in the years after the death. The book is, most of all, a series of acts of understanding. The poems are impelled by a passion to know, and a freedom to follow wherever the truth may lead. The book goes into area of feeling and experience rarely entered in poetry. The ebullient language, the startling, far-reaching images, the sense of extraordinary connectedness seize us immediately. Sharon Olds transforms a harsh reality with truthfulness, with beauty, with humor—and without bitterness. The deep pain in The Father arises from a death, and from understanding a life. But there is joy as well. In the end, we discover we have been reading not a grim accounting but an inspiriting tragedy, transcending the personal. The radiance and daring that have always distinguished Sharon Old’s work find here their most powerful expression.
Download or read book The Dead and the Living written by Sharon Olds and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-12-05 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner comes a beautifully realized collection of poems about childhood, love, marriage, children, and honoring the dead. Larry Lewis say, “The Dead and the Living is an unignorable book, something truly rare. The feeling behind it is painful, but exquisitely so. Pain made into art or what, in another time, people called ‘beauty.’” It is an achievement of a poet writing in the full measure of her powers. The Lamont poetry selection of the Academy of American Poets.
Download or read book Gold Cell written by Sharon Olds and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-12-05 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling collection of poems 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). A collection by the much praised poet whose second book The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Download or read book One Secret Thing written by Sharon Olds and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-01-26 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony. The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humour, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy - sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and danger - public and private - illuminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revision, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon Olds's characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power.
Download or read book The Unswept Room written by Sharon Olds and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-12-05 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner—a stunning collection of poems about history, childhood, nurturing a new generation of children, and the transformative power of marital love. With poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and counterpoint, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humor, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical, emotional, and spiritual sensations that are seldom the stuff of poetry. These are poems that strike for the heart, as Olds captures our imagination with unexpected wordplay, sprung rhythms, and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us her finest collection.
Download or read book Balladz written by Sharon Olds and published by Random House. This book was released on 2023-01-12 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 'She proves triumphantly evergreen' OBSERVER, *POETRY BOOK OF THE MONTH* 'You will follow wherever she leads' NEW YORK TIMES 'The most accessible poet of her generation' TELEGRAPH '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.'
Download or read book Ghosts in the Schoolyard written by Eve L. Ewing and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-02-05 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools.” That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt. But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures—they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike? Ewing’s answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools—schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs—as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.
Download or read book Magic City written by Yusef Komunyakaa and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 1992-10-09 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning poet evokes his childhood in Louisiana.
Download or read book She Walks in Beauty written by Caroline Kennedy and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2011-04-05 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In She Walks in Beauty, Caroline Kennedy has once again marshaled the gifts of our greatest poets to pay a very personal tribute to the human experience, this time to the complex and fascinating subject of womanhood. Inspired by her own reflections on more than fifty years of life as a young girl, a woman, a wife, and a mother, She Walks in Beauty draws on poetry's eloquent wisdom to ponder the many joys and challenges of being a woman. Kennedy has divided the collection into sections that signify to her the most notable milestones, passages, and universal experiences in a woman's life, and she begins each of these sections with an introduction in which she explores and celebrates the most important elements of life's journey. The collection includes works by Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon Olds, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, W. H. Auden, Adrienne Rich, Sandra Cisneros, Anne Sexton, W. S. Merwin, Dorothy Parker, Queen Elizabeth I, Lucille Clifton, Naomi Shahib Nye, and W. B. Yeats. Whether it's falling in love, breaking up, friendship, marriage, motherhood, or growing old, She Walks in Beauty is a priceless resource for anyone, male or female, who wants a deeper understanding and appreciation of what it means to be a woman.
Download or read book One With Others written by C.D. Wright and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2012-12-11 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honored in "Best Books of the Year" listings from The New Yorker, National Public Radio, Library Journal, and The Huffington Post. "One With Others represents Wright's most audacious experiment yet."—The New Yorker "[A] book . . . that defies description and discovers a powerful mode of its own."— National Public Radio "[A] searing dissection of hate crimes and their malignant legacy."—Booklist Today, Gentle Reader, the sermon once again: "Segregation After Death." Showers in the a.m. The threat they say is moving from the east. The sheriff's club says Not now. Not nokindofhow. Not never. The children's minds say Never waver. Air fanned by a flock of hands in the old funeral home where the meetings were called [because Mrs. Oliver owned it free and clear], and that selfsame air, sanctified and doomed, rent with racism, and it percolates up from the soil itself . . . In this National Book Award finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, C.D. Wright returns to her native Arkansas and examines explosive incidents grounded in the Civil Rights Movement. In her signature style, Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, interviews, newspaper accounts, and personal memories—especially those of her incandescent mentor, Mrs. Vittitow—with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, and activists. This history leaps howling off the page. C.D. Wright has published over a dozen works of poetry and prose. Among her honors are the Griffin Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and lives outside of Providence, Rhode Island.
Download or read book Selected Poems written by Sharon Olds and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds's poetry 'pure fire in the hands' and cheered the 'roughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss'. This rich selection - made by the author - exhibits those qualities in poem after poem, reflecting, moreover, an exciting experimentation with rhythm and language and a movement toward an embrace beyond the personal. Subjects are revisited - the pain of childhood, adolescent sexual stirrings, the fulfilment of marriage, the wonder of children - but each re-casting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions and conceits. A powerful distillation of the best work from one of America's most gifted and widely read poets, drawn from her seven published volumes, this is a testament to a remarkable writer's depth, range and continuing development.
Download or read book Wolf Tones written by Jj Marsh and published by . This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You escaped the past. Here comes the present. Fifteen years ago, Rolf was destined for the gutter. His luck has changed. Now a cellist with the Salzburg City Orchestra, he has his dream job and dizzying prospects. All because of her. Smart, sexy, well connected and crazy about him, Leonor is his fantasy woman. She made him and he'll never forget it. Neither will she. She chooses Rolf's diet, his friends, his decisions and career path. She knows best. When does a champion turn controller? While he submits to domination at home, he struggles at work. The maestro is determined to break down and rebuild his new cellist. Clash after clash shatter Rolf's confidence until he doubts everything about himself. Then a rumour reaches his ear. Has he misjudged his new friends? Is something more sinister pulling the orchestra's strings? Regardless of the drama behind the scenes, the show must go on. It's the only way to escape his past. A classic artist, Rolf presents the best side of himself, hiding the pain of imperfection. A strategy with devastating results.
Download or read book Odd Numbers written by Jj Marsh and published by Prewett Bielmann Gmbh. This book was released on 2020-05-22 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Guilty Party meets The Secret History In every group of friends, each has a role. The mother, the dad, the big brother and little sister. All except Gael. The outsider. The one who wasn't there when it happened. Dhan was the jester of the group, until the night he disappeared, taking part of their future with him. Every other New Year's Eve, they gather to remember Dhan's death and to celebrate their friendship. But what if that friendship is built on a lie? Gael's a journalist. Her instinct is to seek out the truth. Two decades later, it's her turn to organise their reunion. In a snowy chalet on New Year's Eve, Gael starts asking questions. She wants to know what really happened that night. Old wounds reopen and a dark secret comes to light, sending a shockwave through their lives. Truth comes at a price. "Twist follows twist in a riveting mystery as sharp as the shards of glass from a shattered champagne bottle." Abbie Frost, author of 'The Guesthouse'
Download or read book A Study Guide for Sharon Olds s I Go Back to May 1937 written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on 2016 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Study Guide for Sharon Olds's "I Go Back to May 1937," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
Download or read book The Dead and the Living written by Sharon Olds and published by Knopf. This book was released on 1984-02-12 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner comes a beautifully realized collection of poems about childhood, love, marriage, children, and honoring the dead. Larry Lewis say, “The Dead and the Living is an unignorable book, something truly rare. The feeling behind it is painful, but exquisitely so. Pain made into art or what, in another time, people called ‘beauty.’” It is an achievement of a poet writing in the full measure of her powers. The Lamont poetry selection of the Academy of American Poets.
