Sharon Olds Honored with the Wallace Stevens Award

By Tim Cheng | September 19 2016 | Humanities & Social Sciences

Poet Sharon Olds received the Academy of American Poets’ 2016 Wallace Stevens Award. Given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry, the award was established in 1994, and carries a $100,000 stipend. Recipients are chosen by the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors. Mark Doty, a member of the Board, has said that “her poems, in their evocation of trauma or desire, in their grief and joy and comedy, have opened new possibilities for poetry in our time. She is an American master, and a national treasure.”

Sharon Olds is the author of ten previous books of poetry, including the Pulitzer–winning STAG’S LEAP in 2012. Her new collection of poetry, ODES, addresses and embodies many aspects of love and gender, opening with the powerful and tender “Ode to the Hymen.”

https://www.poets.org/academy-american-poets/winner/prizes/wallace-stevens-award/sharon-olds-wallace-stevens-award

Odes
978-0-451-49362-0
Following the Pulitzer prize-winning collection Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds gives us a stunning book of odes. Opening with the powerful and tender “Ode to the Hymen,” 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 examination that, like all her work, is universal, by turns searing and charming in its honesty. From the bodily joys and sorrows of childhood to the deaths of those dearest to us, Olds shapes the world in language that is startlingly fresh, profound in its conclusions, and life-giving for the reader.
$26.95 US
Sep 20, 2016
Hardcover
128 Pages
Knopf