Remarkably an entire collection of poems about Olds' experience of coping with a divorce. (Divorce seems almost a too-harsh word to use to describe the lyrical pain she conveys in her poems.) Remarkable, because the poems (sorted in a roughly chronological order) stand out as individual pieces, c...
I left him to it, the closest I wanted to get to the news was to start to sleep with him, slowly, while he was reading, the clouds of printed words gradually becoming bedsheets around us. When he left me, I thought, If only I had read the paper, and vowed, In two years, I will have the Times deli...
When she was awake, I was purpose, I was a soft domestic prowling of goodness—only when she slept was I free to think the thoughts of one in bondage. I had wanted to be someone—not just someone’s mom, but someone, some one. Yet I know that this work that I did with her lay at the heart of what ma...