Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002

A powerful collection from one of our most gifted and widely read poets–117 of her finest poems drawn from her seven published volumes.

Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds’s poetry “pure fire in the hands” and cheered the “roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss.” This rich selection exhibits those qualities in poem after poem, reflecting, moreover, an exciting experimentation with rhythm and language and a movement toward an embrace beyond the personal. Subjects are revisited–the pain of childhood, adolescent sexual stirrings, the fulfillment of marriage, the wonder of children–but each recasting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions and conceits.

Strike Sparks is a testament to this remarkable poet’s continuing and amazing growth.


From the Hardcover edition.

• Odes
• Stag's Leap: Poems
• Satan Says (Pitt Poetry Series)
• Forest Primeval: Poems (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award)
• The Dead and the Living
• Bird Book: Poems
• American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Poets)
• The Unswept Room
• The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton
• Wild Iris