Blood, Tin, Straw

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. The winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag's Leap, she is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the winner of many other awards and honours. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of Isidor Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City.

"Her sixth book [Blood, Tin, Straw] is without doubt her strongest... Olds' trademark has long been her astonishing candour... and this quality is firmly in place here, but she has added to it a new strength and lyricism of metaphor and image. The shock she delivers is that of true poetry" Library Journal "Olds has always been a daring poet of the flesh, but now in Blood, Tin, Straw, a major work, she embraces the entire universe... Olds writes more forthrightly about female sexuality - the hunger, blood, tensility and heat of it - than any of her sister poets. This collection is poetry as memoir, mined from the very core of her being" Booklist "Olds remains too little-known in the UK... readers new to her will be astounded" Independent "Sharon Olds' poems are pure fire in the hands... I love the toughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss" -- Michael Ondaatje