Balladz: Olds, Sharon

Knopf Publishing Group, paperback Publication Date: October 4, 2022 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 white privilege without apology; 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 ca