Description: "'At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror," writes Olds in this self-scouring ... 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, in which she sings of her childhood, young womanhood, and old age 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; ... seeing how we've spoiled the earth but carrying a stray indoor spider carefully back out to the garden. It is Sharon's gift to us that in her richly detailed exposure of her sorrows she can still elegize songbirds, her true kin, and write that heaven comes here in life, not after it"--
Review Quotes: GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE FINALIST
"A commanding poet . . . This substantial gathering is funny, furious, discomfiting, ravishing, mythic, and sorrowful . . . As always, Olds describes herself and her loved ones in startlingly microscopic detail, finding beauty in the ravages of age and even death . . . Passionately precise, Olds unites the primordial with the scientific, the mundane with the chthonic, flesh with spirit." --Donna Seaman, Booklist "A gorgeous, introspective collection. Beginning with a series of quarantine poems, she also meditates on her own white privilege, on her mother's abuse, and on aging, among other subjects. At once personal and political, the book perfectly encapsulates this confounding time." --Columbia Magazine "Ranging from quarantine to issues of whiteness, the Pulitzer and T.S. Eliot Prize-winning Olds continues her laserlike attentiveness to the life around her life as she crisscrosses childhood, young adulthood, and contemporary times, sometimes in the style of Emily Dickinson." --Library Journal