Olds, Sharon: Odes

Knopf, paperback Publication Date: September 20, 2016 Publisher Marketing: PULITZER PRIZE WINNER - An intimate collection of poems that "picks up where Stag's Leap left off, which is to say that it contains some of the best and most ingenious poems of her career." --The New York TimesOpening with the powerful and tender "Ode to the Hymen," Sharon Olds addresses and embodies, in this age-old poetic form, many aspects of love and gender and sexual politics in a collection that is centered on the body and its structures and pleasures. The poems extend parts of her narrative as a daughter, mother, wife, lover, friend, and poet of conscience that will be familiar from earlier collections, each episode and memory burnished by the wisdom and grace and humor of looking back. In such poems as "Ode to My Sister," "Ode of Broken Loyalty," "Ode to My Whiteness," "Blow Job Ode," and "Ode to the Last Thirty-Eight Trees in New York City Visible from This Window," Olds treats us to an intimate examina