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The Dead and the Living

Poems

Author Sharon Olds
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Paperback
$18.00 US
Knopf
On sale Feb 12, 1984 | 96 Pages | 978-0-394-71563-6
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Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award 

The 1983 Lamont poetry selection of the Academy of American Poets.
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
  • WINNER | 1984
    National Book Critics Circle Awards
© Hillery Stone
SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the recipient of the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement, as well as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the UK’s T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag’s Leap. She is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the recipient of many other awards and honors, including the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first book, Satan Says (1980), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second, The Dead and the Living, which was also the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of the former S. S. Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City. View titles by Sharon Olds

About

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award 

The 1983 Lamont poetry selection of the Academy of American Poets.

Table of Contents

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

Awards

  • WINNER | 1984
    National Book Critics Circle Awards

Author

© Hillery Stone
SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the recipient of the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement, as well as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the UK’s T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag’s Leap. She is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the recipient of many other awards and honors, including the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first book, Satan Says (1980), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second, The Dead and the Living, which was also the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of the former S. S. Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City. View titles by Sharon Olds

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