Arias

by Sharon Olds

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 T. S. ELIOT PRIZE*

Following her recent Odes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet gives us a new collection of poems that sing of a woman’s intimate life and political conscience. The atom bomb, Breaking Bad, the cervix, Trayvon Martin, her mother’s return from the dead: the peerless Sharon Olds once again takes up subject matter that is both difficult and ordinary, elusive and everywhere.

Each aria is shaped by its unique melody and moral logic, as Olds stands centre stage to account for her own late romance and chance wisdom, and faces the tragic life of our nation and our planet. ‘I cannot say I did not ask / to be born,’ begins one aria, which considers how, with what actions, with what thirst, we each ask for a turn, and receive our portion on earth. Olds delivers these pieces with all the passion, anguish, and solo force that make a great performance, in the process enlarging the soul of her readers.

‘Olds is a supreme poet of the body; I’ll be reading her till I die’ Fiona Benson

Genres: Poetry, Adult, Contemporary, Unfinished, Literary Fiction

198 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 7, 2019

About the author

Born in San Francisco on November 19, 1942, Sharon Olds earned a B.A. at Stanford University and a Ph.D. at Columbia University.

Her first collection of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Olds's following collection, The Dead & the Living (1983), received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Her other collections include Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004, Knopf), The Unswept Room (2002), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Gold Cell (1997), The Wellspring (1995), and The Father (1992), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

About Olds's poetry, one reviewer for the New York Times said, "Her work has a robust sensuality, a delight in the physical that is almost Whitmanesque. She has made the minutiae of a woman's everyday life as valid a subject for poetry as the grand abstract themes that have preoccupied other poets."

Olds's numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in more than a hundred collections.

Olds held the position of New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. She currently teaches poetry workshops at New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program as well as a workshop at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. She was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Melinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dreamy. As always with Sharon Olds collections, I could use, like, a 50% reduction in poems involving body fluids. But the majority were great.

[Katherine Bishop · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Her Birthday as Ashes in Seawater” might have been the first I read from this collection (in the New Yorker). It caught my breath and rushed waves over me. I’ve copied it out & mailed it to friends. I still leak a bit when I revisit it, what, two years later?

Then there’s the joy of “The First New Human Animal,” the ire & fire of “Rasputin Aria,” and the humor of “Theme Psalm” — the first Olds poem to make me laugh out loud twice.

My husband and I have been quoting lines from this collection to one another all week.

Why four stars? Call it four and a half if you like.
Olds is a master worker. A lot of this is luscious. But other bits of it haven’t quite reached me yet. Maybe later they’ll triumphantly navigate my synapses. That can happen with poetry.

A wonderful thing to have in the world and to read.

[Mitch Rogers · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is the literary embodiment of the phrase “take off one accessory before stepping out the door.” There are a lot of poems in this collection, and some of them are quite weak. Often, after reading several in a row, it feels like you are getting various drafts at what should have been just one poem, and the effect is not one of cumulative power but tediousness.

But when Olds hits one, she really knocks it out of the park. A big reason I got this collection is because it includes “I Cannot Say I Did Not.”

[Dessi Bocheva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not-cheesy poetry is always an achievement

[Jolene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the past year -- technically, thirteen months -- I read seven Sharon Olds poetry collections, including the four most recent: Stag's Leap (2012), Odes (2016), Balladz (2022), and now, of course, Arias (2019).

Spending a year with Olds has been a gift. She comes up more often than you'd think -- often when my friends and I, hours into conversation, half drunk on wine and nostalgia , start in on THE topic: what's next? when are we having kids? can we afford it? how long are we going to stay at our current jobs? what's next, what's next, what's next? I've been reading a lot of this poet, I tell them, and what her life and work remind me of is that life is long. Olds was 37 before she was first published, 55 when she got divorced, 71 when she won the Pulitzer for a collection that centered on her divorce. She keeps writing. Balladz was published just last year. She's 81.

By the time you're in your thirties it's cliché (but true nonetheless?) that you never really feel like a grown-up (or whatever you thought it would feel like when you were young). On this train of thought, Olds is a patron saint and an outrageous best friend. I cringe at her aria to anal and feel like a friend and I are gossiping in the corner when I read her back-to-back pieces about sex with her ex-husband and sex her next boyfriend -- but then, later, literally can't read her words about her time at her father's second wife's deathbed without having to pause to blink back tears. I dog-earred too many pages in this library book and even photocopied and printed out "Fear of Motherhood Aria:"

I would look down on the river-delta,
the silver and pearl of the stretch-marks
on the wine-skins, and I was glad it worked,
but something in me did not join in,
as if I wanted to save some freedom
or humanness from female animalness,
from motherness.
...
When she helped
a tiny arm into a sleeve--
or cookied, or bathed, or nursed -- she loved,
but this had been not only love,
it had been like swimming in a flood, treading water
to stay up, live or die. Live,
and die. (37)

This collection (of songs?) is more solemn than Odes. She's interested in humanity and the body and what we owe to each other and what it means to write about any of it. The first few poems talk about Trayvon Martin, 9/11, racial legacies, and the privilege of being a white woman in her seventies, writing about any of it. She circles back to some of her favorite topics: processing her relationship with her mother, Etan Patz, the climate crisis, buttermilk, and -- of course, sex. (The "gliss" poem omg, Sharon!)

The final sections linger on death, eulogizing her mother, her father, her father's second wife, and then a number of writers/artists, including Galway Kinnell, and part of me is like, damn, should I spend the next year reading Galway Kinnell?? 👀👀👀

SOME STAND-OUTS

From "A Pair of Sonnets Against the Corporal Chastisement of Children" (7)

What falls is something
let go of, something gravity
is hauling to it, to tiramisu it--
dessert that says pull me to you. The liver
and lights of the body that the blow strikes are not
magnets, the blow is neither drawn
to its objects nor floated down from its source--
a blow is driven, by an engine, it is
the expression of a heart.

From "Aria to Our Miscarried One, Age 50 Now" (23)

Hi mystery,
hi matter, hi spirit moving through matter.
Twenty years ago, when your father
left me, I wanted to hold hands with you,
my friend in death, the dead one I'd known
best -- and not at all -- who had
deserted this life or been driven from it,
I your garden, oasis, desert.
And I'd never laid down a stone for you,
you seemed like a byway on the path from your sister
to your brother. You who were part-formed,
how close I could have felt to you if I'd
known what a hidden story I still
was to myself.

Also: "Fear of Motherhood Aria" (37), "I Think My Mother" (91), "Landing in San Francisco on the Way to a Community of Writers (with a line from Tom Waits)" (164)

Praise be Saint Sharon.

[Bethany Wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arias is a collection of rousing poems, laden with a sensibility for the metaphysical aspects of the human experience. Intimate and honest, sometimes straightforward, other times philosophical, each stanza feels deeply personal and revelatory. Striking details exposing the minutiae of life grip the reader, sending her on a stirring journey, as if she were standing next to Olds and observing her stories firsthand. The matriarchal motif takes a look at the elemental relationship between mother and daughter.

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sharon Olds writes the most brilliant, visceral poetry, each word biting into the page. Arias is her strongest collection yet. Her well-crafted sentences beg to be read aloud. And so I do. While walking the length of my hardwood floor, book held aloft, I sing out the words, devouring and delivering each piece with the unflinching, unwavering passion of Old’s compelling voice.

[natàlia · Rating 4 out of 5]

so visceral, so tender, so powerful, so pure.

“If I had to see my face while I am
writing this, I would not write it”.

(i’m just glad i have a physical copy of the book and highlighted every important bit, folded every important page. makes me feel safe to know i can come back)

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this primarily for the (small) section that is a sequel to Stag's Leap, life after her divorce. It feels real, but it feels like that reality is she never fully recovered. Which is probably one of the saddest stories I could imagine right now. It reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend in college, who was asking "Why is it more impressive for a woman to have a successful career being paid to teach other people's children than if she stayed home and raised her own?" I had a few answers to that and I still do (teaching has a larger community impact; the not-chosen feeling of staying at home defaulting to moms instead of being shared close to equally with dads is the unpleasant part for me, not the parent staying home which I think is very valuable). But here, it raises a corollary: "Is it more impressive to receive accolades and prestigious prizes (like the Pulitzer) for movingly documenting a marriage that broke apart than to privately live a fulfilling partnership that lasted?" The latter is the unremarkable story of thousands, millions of people every day, but would you choose "artist"? It is a painful reminder that we do not get to try out multiple versions of our life, we only get the one and it moves forwardly with the indifference of an hourglass. Absences can't be photoshopped in later.

The rest of the poems were a mix from poignant to forgettable. Many didn't register strongly with me. But there were others, like this one that turns suddenly and unexpectedly:

"For You"
In the morning, when I’m pouring the hot milk
into the coffee, I put the side of my
face near the convex pitcher to watch
the last, round drop from the spout,
and it feels like being cheek to cheek
with a baby. Sometimes the orb pops back up,
a ball of cream balanced on a whale’s
watery exhale. Then I gather my tools,
the cherry sounding-board tray that will rest on my
lap, the phone, the bird book to look up
the purple martin. I repeat them as I seek them,
so as not to forget—tray, cell phone,
purple martin; tray, phone,
martin, Trayvon Martin, song was
invented for you, art was made
for you, painting, writing, was yours,
our youngest, our most precious, to remind us
to shield you—all was yours, all that is
left on earth, with your body, was for you.

"Apocalypse Approaching As I'm Aging"
First of all, sound went
well before sight. All around me
the visible--the black-and-white
markings of the hairy and downy,
like hieroglyphs, like characters
in Hebrew, or in Arabic, coming
in from the right side of the page
as if from the future.
When I walked, I could not hear my footsteps,
something was shushing everything [...]

"I Cannot Say I Didn't"
[...]I asked, with everything I did not
have, to be born. And nowhere in any
of it was there meaning, there was only the asking
for being, and then the being, the turn
taken. I want to say that love
is the meaning, but I think that love may be
the means, what we ask with.

"Bay Area Aria"
... I know that this
had never been our permanent home.
It's a wild dance, hands grasping and
letting go and grasping. And I am never coming back.
I am not leaving, and I'm not coming back.

"My Parents' Ashes"
Maybe they have touched, by now.
Maybe a grain of my mother’s bone,
cast in the Pacific a month ago,
has glanced along a grain of my father’s,
loose in the Bay for twenty years.
Maybe a molecule of her
has lain beside a molecule
of him, or interpenetrated
it, an element of her matter
bonding to an element of his,
sodium on potassium,
calcium on magnesium,
Ossa on Pelion, maybe they
have even shared an atom together,
Na, Ca, Mg, or Fe with its
2 electrons in the K-shell,
8 in the L-shell, 14 in the M,
2 in the N, as if they could circle one
nucleus, like parents a crib,
share an atomic weight, their cold
embers conjoining alkalai metals
with earth metals on the periodic
tidal table, as the currents carry them
back and forth under the Golden Gate.
Ashes are the solid residue left
when matter is burned at not too high
a temperature. A molecule
is the smallest particle into which
a substance can be divided and still have
the properties of the original substance,
my mother’s dust, my father’s dust,
ghost legs of a spider crab
picking its way along the rock sea floor. If the
substance were divided further, only atoms
would remain. They died, old, in my arms,
the gift of their last breath went into
my mouth. They chose for their bodies to be burned
at the heat to preserve their grit, they chose
the ocean, chose not the weather of the day
but the words said as the grey fur
blew from our hands into the cradle of salt—
an easy death, and in its way
an easy life, no one they loved
vaporized, the dream covenants kept.

"Landing in San Francisco on the Way to the Community of Writers"
...Galway, I'm glad
you were buried whole--as little of you as was left,
it was all of you there was,
deep in the ground on the slope of the mountain hillside,
and you called all those who could come, to come to you,
the carrion and death-watch beetles, and the worms you loved to honor,
the insects and bacteria and molds and spores, and,
close enough up, they could be heard at their work,
chhhrrrrrrrr, gsmck gsmck gsmck, j-j-j-j-j-j-j-j-j-j-j-j,
so your body could sing its way into the earth,
so your fellow creatures could dance you back into matter.

"Sacred"
I heard the word, a lot, as a child, I
do not know what the word means.
I think it has to do with awe,
or terror. Sometimes, walking alone
in the dry, coastal Berkeley Hills, I'd
enter a grove of eucalyptus,
ivory yellow-green peeling gray skin,
and stop, as if something was with me, or I
was with something--if the earth had a spirit,
non-human, non-god, made of itself. ...

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed these poems. They make use of words like a poet should - the distillation of thought, experience, and idea into a language spirit that is a joy to get drunk on.

This is the first Sharon Olds that I've read. I shall definitely read more. These are poems of childhood and motherhood; birth and death; joy and grief. Olds talks about her mother and father both as living beings and as the dying and the dead. She writes of her growing up and the difficulties that presented. I could list the things she talks about but she talks about all of living, including its begin and its end.

There are Arias, Elegies and Sonnets. The forms are myriad.

I often list the poems I liked the most in my little poetry reviews but there are too many to list but Vigil and Sacred, which come towards the end of the book I found particularly brilliant. Animal Crackers is great too.

But it is all pretty good. As I often say in my reviews of poetry I struggle to know how to adequately review poetry from the point of view of craftsmanship and technique. I don't have the knowledge or vocabulary. I feel the same way about art. But I know when I have felt something or been made to think on something that is beyond just me. Arias does that.

This is poetry to be savoured.

[Pablo Rojas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un poemario que pesa como el negro de su portada y la extensión de cada poema. La tristeza si se alarga se vuelve anodina y tiene algo de alarde. Falta concisión pero se compensa con cierta caracterización que le viene bien a la poesía (no todo puede ocurrir entre la niebla).
Es bueno que un poemario tenga cuerpo, pero a veces le sobra cuerpo.

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Raw, tense, obscene, pastoral, wise, social justice, all in one. I miss my mom every day, so it is hard to read of her mother’s abuse of her, and it is the focus of too many poems for my taste, but she has a singular voice it pays to take heed of, and to hear.

For You In the morning, when I’m pouring the hot milk
into the coffee, I put the side of my
face near the convex pitcher, to watch the last,
round drop from the spout— and it feels
like being cheek to cheek with a baby.
Sometimes the orb pops back up, a ball
of cream balanced on a whale’s watery exhale.
Then I gather the tools of my craft,
the cherry sounding-board tray
for my lap, like the writing-arm of a desk,
the phone, the bird book for looking up the purple martin.
I repeat them as I seek them, so as not to forget:
tray, cell phone, purple martin;
tray, phone, martin, Trayvon Martin,
song was invented for you, all art was made for you,
painting, writing, was yours, our youngest,
our most precious, to remind us to shield you—
all was yours, all that is left on earth,
with your body, was for you.

8 Moons
An atom bomb—does it reduce everything to atoms—to a mist the size of the moon? And the hydrogen bomb—is there water in it? When you drop it, does the mushroom above it look like a splash, as if you’d dropped the moon onto the ocean? If you dropped the moon onto the Pacific, would its diameter fit? Eight moons dropped onto the Pacific would fit on it. We can’t imagine the length of time it took to make the universe. And the death of the earth—for most of us, unimaginable, and therefore inevitable. As if each parent, at the same moment, will see our offspring atomized, our species’ clouds lifting off the globe, the huge, childless atom.

you’re smart, all along you’ve been smart,
your ignorance has been the knowledge that you don’t know
what you don’t know, like a form of intelligence,
and now near the end of the world you under- stand things,
you yourself eschatological, you sense the doctrine of final things.
It is like a religious conversion—from non-belief in your own beauty and strength,
to sudden belief—the light on the road no longer covering
the center of every dream, but you yourself are a light—
it’s like falling in love with yourself, the one who had been the villain.

...felt the full bowl of us, in the tent,
and felt, behind me, the sea,
and the night, and the oval platter
of our solar home, and the
constellations beyond it,
in which we glimpse our stories,
and I felt the great sash of the
Milky Way, as if we are resting
on our own shoulders, and then I sang
my mother out—
I sang the mothers and fathers out,
into the stars and the nothing beyond them,
into which we will follow them, at the end of our turn.

California Aria
I loved the shape of my home state,
jackknifed to the east,
its navel a lake,
its chest a vertical plane,
its abdomen a slope
of one hundred and forty degrees
off vertical, its waist a lean
teenage stomach’s concave angle,
its front geometrical,
its curved back coastal with inlets and outlets.

My mother’s people came here yearning to sing to their God, to breathe free, men and women attacked by their landlords, who called them wretched refuse, teeming with vermin. They’d pushed off from that shore, homeless on the ocean, through calm and tempest—sometimes in sight of a fountain tossed up out of the brow of a fish—until they came to these low hills which lift up from a land where we have set a lamp with a golden torch, to remind us, here at the door: entering through it is a promise to leave it open behind us.

Off and on, all his life, he has emitted light. I would watch him sleep in the dark woods, his brow reflecting starlight.

When I’m think / ing a bout / scansion,
weak-weak-STRONG, weak-weak-STRONG, STRONG-weak,
anapest, anapest, trochee— if I want to know a poem,
Biblically, respiratorily, cardio- vascularly,
I chart the rhythms of its lines—
and I no longer fear that beat interests
me so deeply because I was a child
beaten to the 4/4 beat of the hymns.

Did I ask with the space in the ground, like a portion of breath, where my body will rest, when it is motionless, when its elements move back into the earth?

I want to say that love is the meaning, but I think that love may be the means, what we ask with.

When I think of doing the work of my undone mourning, I think I see, before me, in the ground, stairs appear down into the earth—and myself, and my starveling, descending.

Now we were at the other end, there was a wind in that room, rising, falling, our girl was shoaled, she was waiting for a tide to float her keel up from the rock and coral. And we did not hold her back, though we held her so she would not be without company as she made her way to her native shore, where she had come from. Her face became smoother and smoother, for peace comes dropping slow, dropping from the veils of the morning, to where the cricket sings, she lifted free, in the salt air on our faces, silent, silent, in the quiet room, no breath—she was there, at last, in the pure matter of the world, in the deep heart’s core.

[Maddie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dnf-Ed little over halfway, I just wasn’t feeling this one. I normally like Sharon Olds, but there was something about these poems that kind of lacked her normal spunk.

[Quinn Rennerfeldt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not every poem is a banger, but the vast majority are amazing and it’s a nearly 200 page book, therefore Sharon Olds is still one of the greatest poets of her generation.

[Shan Horn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love love love this. There is nothing like a Sharon Olds poem, I always go back to them and find so many breathtaking.

[Maik Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arias is Olds' most autobiographical and reflective collection that keeps rumbling on in me. She brilliantly tells about her partners, mother, father, love, sex, child, being a mother herself and many different other themes. It seems as all part of her life resonated in her poems. In Burial Day we can find, for example, the embodiment of her poetry in lines such as 'And I wonder if the world is not silent— to be inside of—if it groans, if it creaks as it turns. I know there is no one there in him to hear it if it does, I know the slack or rigid, lax or flexible, husk is not he.' In some parts of the collection, I had to skip some pages as these poems were not of interest to me (yet). But, certainly, this is definitely a book to which we have to come back later in live. - Recommend this book for all poetry lovers who want to read about a variety of topics covered between two bookcovers.

[Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sharon Olds is the GOAT. “My Father’s Whiteness” and “Rasputin Aria” (among others!) laid me all the way out. Bless Sharon, forever.

[Joana · Rating 3 out of 5]

When you were first visible to me,
you were upside down, not sound asleep but
before sleep, blue-gray,
tethered to the other world
which followed you out from inside me. Then you
opened your silent mouth, and the first
sound, a crackling of oxygen snapping
threads of mucus, broke the quiet,
and with that gasp you pulled your first
earth
air
in, to your lungs which had been
waiting entirely compressed, the lining
touching itself all over, all inner – now each
lung became a working hollow, blown
partway full, then wholly full, the
birth day of your delicate bellows.
And then – first your face, small tragic
mask, then your slender body, flushed
a just-before-sunrise rose, and your folded,
crowded, apricot arms and legs
spring out,
in slow blossom.
And they washed you – her, you, her –
leaving the spring cheese vernix, and they wrapped her in a
clean, not new, blanket, a child of
New York City,
and the next morning, the milk came in,
it drove the fire yarn of its food through
passageways which had passed nothing
before, now lax, slack, gushing
when she sucked, or mewled. In a month’s time,
she was plump with butterfat, her wrists
invisible down somewhere inside
the richness of her flesh. My life as I had known it
had ended, my life was hers, now,
and I did not yet know her. And that was my new
life, to learn her, as much as I could,
each day, and slowly I have come to know her,
and thus myself, and all of us, and I will
not be done with my learning when I return to where she
came from.

[Francesca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the poems in this volume are classics. I recognized them when I came upon them, "I Cannot Say I Did Not", and "The Relics". Sections of the book take a theme and turn it over and over in different ways. The mother's beatings show up over and over until their mention takes on a rhythm of their own that suggests the frequency that they preoccupy the adult who was the child. But there are many facets to the mother, and we see the love, the wish to be loved and cherished, the wish to understand, and the wish to build a different relationship to her own child. Then again there are elegies, not just to parents but to friends, many friends who are poets. This theme of saying goodbye to beloved figures, imagining them consigned to the mountain or scattered in the seabed, speaking through the waves and the moon, becomes another major theme in the book.

[Arlo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...was about to give what I had made of what my mother had given me, the beatings, and the music—I felt the full bowl of us, in the tent, and felt, behind me, the sea, and the night, and the oval platter of our solar home, and the constellations beyond it, in which we glimpse our stories, and I felt the great sash of the Milky Way, as if we are resting on our own shoulders, and then I sang my mother out—I sang the mothers and fathers out, into the stars and the nothing beyond them, into which we will follow them, at the end of our turn."..

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This period of Sharon Olds' work--Odes, Arias, and Balladz--consists largely of poems that are intimate and loosely structured. Olds' work here focuses on daily life: family, sex, and sentiment. If anything, Arias has too many poems and suffers a bit from an abundance that also leads to a lack of focus. On a sentence-by-sentence level, Olds remains a tight crafter of words. While this collection is called Arias, and there are many in the collection, it also contains loose sonnets and elegies. Overall, if it suffers, it suffers from too much of a good thing.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very powerful collection of poetry that is brutally honest, especially in her acknowledgement of a violent, abusive mother and neglectful father. She doesn't shy away from raw language when necessary but the emotion that emanates from the page is often beautiful. It probably ranks 5 stars, and while many poems are exceptional, as a whole the collection didn't really touch me in a connecting way.

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Olds is an extraordinary poet. This is a rich contemporary collection reflecting on the whole of her life and on the whole of this american life and our current teetering on the precipice of disaster.

I need to own this book and cycle it into my poem a day selections. It is too dense and too full for me to even comment on.

[kp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any book by Sharon Olds is worth reading, and though this one suffers from some repetitiveness, it offers the same insistent reverance for the material body in the material world that makes Olds such a thrilling poet. The poems are often about deaths and death itself, yet the book is not bleak because it is shot through with wonder and forgiveness.

[kp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any book by Sharon Olds is worth reading, and though this one suffers from some repetitiveness, it offers the same insistent reverance for the material body in the material world that makes Olds such a thrilling poet. The poems are often about deaths and death itself, yet the book is not bleak because it is shot through with wonder and forgiveness.

[Mari C.L. Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of positives but a lot of repetition between poems, making the collection feel somewhat bloated. I think this would be much better if read one or two poems a day rather than over a few sittings, as drawing out the reading might negate the aforementioned repetition.

There were some gems in the collection, and standout lines, but on the whole it fell short of my expectations.

[Laurie Summer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sharon Olds writes about the real stuff of life in her poems, and this collection covers the gamut—love, death, child abuse, friendship. I highly recommend reading Olds if you have not. I always gain beauty and insight when I do.

[Davi Kladakis · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars this is the first time I read any poetry by Sharon Olds. Not knowing anything about Olds, I did a little research. For her poetry it is extremely important to somewhat understand who she is. A lot of her poems in this book have to do with her childhood and trauma so be warned.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m glad I read these poems. They were a lot about her children, her family, her mother (a whole lot about her mother)., They often caused me to reflect on my own life. Which I appreciated. There is much here to like. They were very accessible. I liked them.

[Melissa Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's a gift to the world, both in gorgeous content and in length, three books in one. I first fell in love with Sharon Olds' words half my life ago. She saved me then, continues to save me now. Always and forever my favorite poet.