SHARON OLDS was born in 1942, in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her first book of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second, The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and in the N.Y.U. workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. More recently she was awarded the Walt Whitman Citation for Merit by the New York State Writers Institute of the State University of New York. The citation officially invested her with the title of New York State Poet for 1998-2000.
Part One: Poems for the Dead
I. PUBLIC
Ideographs
Photograph of the Girl
Race Riot, Tulsa, 1921
Portrait of a Child
Nevsky Prospekt
The Death of Marilyn Monroe
The Issues
Aesthetics of the Shah
Things That Are Worse Than Death
II. PRIVATE
The Guild
Grandmother Love Poem
The Eye
Birthday Poem for My Grandmother
Of All the Dead That Have Come to Me, This Once
Farewell Poem
The Winter After Your Death
Miscarriage
The End
Best Friends
Absent One
Part Two: Poems for the Living
I. THE FAMILY
Possessed
The Victims
The Forms
The Departure
Burn Center
The Ideal Father
Fate
My Father Snoring
The Moment
My Father’s Breasts
The Takers
The Pact
The Derelict
Late Speech with My Brother
The Elder Sister
II. THE MEN
The Connoisseuse of Slugs
Poem to My First Lover
New Mother
The Line
The Fear of Oneself
Poem to My Husband from My Father’s Daughter
Sex Without Love
Ecstasy
III. THE CHILDREN
Exclusive
Six-Year-Old Boy
Eggs
Size and Sheer Will
For My Daughter
Rite of Passage
Relinquishment
Son
Pre-Adolescent in Spring
Blue Son
Pajamas
The Killer
The Sign of Saturn
Armor
35/10
The Missing Boy
Bread
Bestiary
The One Girl at the Boys’ Party
The Couple
