The Dead and the Living - Paperback

by Sharon Olds (Author)

From the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner comes a beautifully realized collection of poems about childhood, love, marriage, children, and honoring the dead.

Larry Lewis say, "The Dead and the Living is an unignorable book, something truly rare. The feeling behind it is painful, but exquisitely so. Pain made into art or what, in another time, people called 'beauty.'" It is an achievement of a poet writing in the full measure of her powers.

Front Jacket

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

Author Biography

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.