The Unswept Room

From Sharon Olds—a stunning new collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and counterpoint, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humor.

From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation of children and the transformative power of marital love, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical, emotional, and spiritual sensations that are seldom the stuff of poetry.

These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imagination with unexpected wordplay, sprung rhythms, and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us her finest collection.

Book Magazine

You don't have to attend one of Olds' readings to appreciate these poems, but it is astonishing to compare how well the distinctive poetic voice echoes the author's own. Book after book, in perfectly tuned four-stress laments, Olds captivates readers with impressions of daily life. Often self-deprecating and humorous, she records the so-called "best hours of our lives," including infancy and first kisses. For Olds, looking back is never gratuitous, and while there is much darkness in the author's own childhood, many of her poems demonstrate the ways an attentive adult life can rectify a troubled youth. Poets often negotiate their past in verse, but no one serves up the humor and grace of common domesticity like Olds.

Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her previous books are Satan Says, The Dead and the Living, The Gold Cell, The Wellspring, The Father, and Blood, Tin, Straw. She was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1998 to 2000. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and was one of the founders of the NYU workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. Her work has received the Harriet Monroe Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, and the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. She lives in New York City.