Balladz / Sharon Olds.

"This is a Borzoi Book" -- title page verso.

"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize"-- cover.

Quarantine. Quarantine -- May 14, 2020 -- My hand -- Quarantine -- 8 steps of 2 steps down -- After -- Anatomy lesson for the officer -- My head and my mother's breast in quarantine together -- Centipede -- Yes -- Quarantine argiope -- Not once -- Meditation during the sufferings and deaths of others -- Before the electric traps arrived -- Isolation liverwurst -- Quarantine fast -- Narcissus takes another look at household tasks -- Monday, November 2, 2020 -- Quarantine puzzle -- Narcissus in quarantine -- 339th morning of my easy quarantine -- X-ray & rats -- New Year's song -- Sprung trap -- Spotted aria -- When I looked out -- A song near the end of the world -- Amherst balladz -- Let us play -- Yesterday -- You did not sell -- The blueing -- I did not shave -- to visit your town -- I slept -- in your town -- behind a door -- In one double-glaze pane -- The air -- was close -- the pane -- slid high -- Outside your room -- in the wain's coat -- At the center of your room -- No Jack I -- nor killed a joint -- When I came to Emily's house late -- Balladz -- Best friend ballad -- Ballad of the chair -- Grandmother with parakeet -- Paper doll ballad, for Fats -- Crazy Sharon talks to the bishop -- Ballad of once Mike Carter -- Cuckoo ballad -- Joined ballad -- Snap pants off like -- Spectrum ballad -- Ballad of the blossming branch -- Ballad of EIGHMIWAY -- Subway ballad -- Dear Stanley -- Ballad torn apart -- Geraldine Dodge ballad -- Ms. Turbation -- Not extinct yet -- Hair ballad -- Rubber shower mat ballad -- Handerchief ballad -- Epidermis ballad -- Album from a previous existence. If I had been able -- Genesis -- My mother's meat grinder -- Her portrait -- Bad & Crazy -- When they told me God could read my mind -- Tender bitter -- In praise of the tear glands -- Goodbye -- What came next after our father's death -- Ghazal confessional -- White boy in pajamas, BIg Sur Inn, Gulf War -- The communicant -- Biance helps me clean my attic -- 5 o'clockface -- Improv -- If I were to sing myself -- Into Tahoe -- This is just to say -- To Chase, after the diagnosis -- To Chase, during her surgery -- All of a sudden I see, and my heart sinks -- What I look like -- Dream near the end -- Elegies. Transformations -- Her brother -- Confessional (for S.B.) -- That Goddess -- Wasn't afraid -- Looking for Galway on the Vermont Mountainside -- Suddenly -- After reading Shallcross -- When they say you have maybe three months left -- Heroin -- When the cancer has come back, sleeping in his house with him but not in his bed with him -- His birthday -- His voice, a week before his spirits follows his voice out -- Three views of him asleep, his final days -- The preparing -- The box -- After an epitaph on an English headstone -- Can't sleep -- Komodo.

"A new poetry collection from Pulitzer and T. S. Eliot Prize winner Sharon Olds. "At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror," writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating volume, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, and at its center boasts what she calls Amherst Balladz (whose syntax honors Emily Dickinson: "she was our Girl - our Woman - / Man enough - for me") and many more in her own contemporary, long-flowing-sentence rhythm, in which she sings of her childhood, young womanhood, and old age all mixed up together, seeing an early lover in the one who is about to buried; seeing her white privilege without apology; seeing her mother, whom readers of Olds will recognize, "flushed and exalted at punishment time"; seeing how we've spoiled the earth but carrying a stray indoor spider carefully back out to the garden. It is Sharon's gift to us that in her richly detailed exposure of her sorrows she can still elegize songbirds, her true kin, and write that heaven comes here in life, not after it"-- Provided by publisher.