Kirjahaku

The poems in Toby Olson’s We Are the Fire, a selection made by the poet himself of his later work, stand as better than half of what he wishes to save from the years 1970-84. (The collections Home and Aesthetics, published by Membrane Press, Milwaukee, in 1976 and 1978 respectively, complement the present volume.) Olson came into national prominence when his second novel, Seaview, received the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1983, but as a writer he has always given his poetry prime place. Readers of Olson’s novels will recognize familiar themes among these poems that parallel their development in his fiction––”Incest” and “The Father” did in fact appear in his first novel, The Life of Jesus (1976). The landscape of Cape Cod, the setting for much of Seaview, is evoked again and again in “Birdsongs” and “The Florence Poems,” a tender memorial to a close friend whose death from cancer achieves a communion that transcends grief. And in Olson’s ongoing series “Standards,” of which six are included here, his singular lyric eroticism is underscored by his remarkable metaphrasing of American popular songs. “For me,” Olson says, “the making of poetry increasingly becomes an act of celebration. What is celebrated is not the significance of things and events but the things and events themselves. It is not the tales but the details that I am concerned with.” We Are the Fire lights the details.

The poems in Toby Olson’s We Are the Fire, a selection made by the poet himself of his later work, stand as better than half of what he wishes to save from the years 1970-84. (The collections Home and Aesthetics, published by Membrane Press, Milwaukee, in 1976 and 1978 respectively, complement the present volume.) Olson came into national prominence when his second novel, Seaview, received the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1983, but as a writer he has always given his poetry prime place. Readers of Olson’s novels will recognize familiar themes among these poems that parallel their development in his fiction––”Incest” and “The Father” did in fact appear in his first novel, The Life of Jesus (1976). The landscape of Cape Cod, the setting for much of Seaview, is evoked again and again in “Birdsongs” and “The Florence Poems,” a tender memorial to a close friend whose death from cancer achieves a communion that transcends grief. And in Olson’s ongoing series “Standards,” of which six are included here, his singular lyric eroticism is underscored by his remarkable metaphrasing of American popular songs. “For me,” Olson says, “the making of poetry increasingly becomes an act of celebration. What is celebrated is not the significance of things and events but the things and events themselves. It is not the tales but the details that I am concerned with.” We Are the Fire lights the details.

Olson's first book of new poetry in sixteen years. Human Nature is the poet and novelist Toby Olson's first book of new poetry since We Are the Fire (New Directions, 1984). The intervening years saw five of his novels published to strong critical acclaim. "But," says Olson, "one day I woke from fiction to discover I'd not written a poem in close to ten years. How to return to poetry after being away from it so long?" Certainly not in repetition of things done before. In Human Nature, Olson joins the novelist's art to the poet's reflections of friends and events and times gone by. When memory fades, replaced by story, the reader of these remarkable narrative meditations begins to realize the ways in which poetry might disclose different truths, born of the reinvention of experience. "In Human Nature," says Olson, "even the most autobiographical poems let fiction in."

Toby Olson's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel follows Allen-a golf hustler-and his wife, Melinda, across an American wasteland to return Melinda to her childhood home on Cape Cod; Melinda is dying of cancer and hopes to reach the seaside where she was born before her end comes. Allen earns their way east by hustling at courses en route. Outside of Tucson, the two meet a Pima Indian and activist named Bob White, who joins them on the remainder of their journey for mysterious reasons of his own. Allen's former friend, Richard, a cocaine dealer whom he has crossed and who is now determined to kill him, follows closely behind; the lines that draw these people together end at Seaview Links, where the novel reaches its apocalypse.

"Many of these powerfully pirouetting, lyrical narratives are long and lean and muscled with conundrums. Olson's poetry becomes jazz as he performs myriad variations on a theme."--Booklist

A wonderful story of what family means, of the flesh-level pain of sibling rivalry, and the discovery of love. It is a fantastic and beautiful tapestry of some of the most imaginative and precise prose writing going on in America today. Toby Olson stands tall among the handful of writers I most admire and respect.—Richard Wiley Write A Letter to Billy is a delectably complicated maze that kept me spellbound from start to finish. Only the most sophisticated of writers could manage to combine the seriousness of a quest for identity and meaning with the intensity of a thriller, not to mention an excursion into deep-sea diving and the resort life of southern California. Once again, Toby Olson has written a terrific novel full of peril and surprise, offering startling revelations and sudden expansions of the heart and mind."—Lynne Sharon Schwartz United with a long-lost teenage daughter, a retired Navy underwater repair specialist investigates a mysterious list his father had written just before his death. Some of the items are crossed off, but one of the unfinished tasks haunts him: "Write letter to Billy." What had his father planned to tell him? What he learns changes his life forever. Influenced by D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens, Toby Olson’s pointed examination of memory and consciousness illustrates how the unraveling of external mystery leads to self discovery. Toby Olson, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, has published eight books of fiction and twenty-two books of poetry. His work has appeared in over two hundred newspapers, magazines, and anthologies. Olson’s novels include At Sea, Dorit in Lesbos, Utah, and The Woman Who Escaped from Shame. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and North Truro, Massachusetts.

El Malabarista, pianist and juggler for a troupe of sexual performance artists, is found dead in the dusty wilderness, his fingers crushed. Beginning like a murder mystery, this novel defies all the usual expectations of a murder mystery plot, by juxtaposing ""real"" events in two different decades with a draft version of a hack sci-fi novella. This mixed narrative serves as a meta-fictional commentary on the efforts of a retired sex-theatre artist, a hairstylist/pulp writer, a doctoral student, and a host of other characters to, not only solve the murder, but to uncover its motivation, which seems to be linked to El Malabarista's knowledge of the whereabouts of a certain boxed treasure.

The Bitter Half disrobes the reality of gender, performing a striptease of masks and prosthetic devices, the subtle articulations and miscues of desire. A spit-curl lovingly tucked behind a diamond stud earring, hair brushed pageboy-style, a bibliographic collection of mastectomy scars: Toby Olson's characters swarm with sexual multiplicity, each offering for exhibit a cyclorama of titillating identities. This game of poses, of one self revealed within another, opens in a jail in Depressionera Pearce, Arizona. Chris Pollard, a consultant in the field of prison escapology, has arrived to investigate the case of an inmate who's broken out of every prison in which he has been detained. The two develop an evasive fondness from a distance - an attention to cowlicks and thin lips from between bars. Their relationship remains concealed among levels of identity, Russian Matryoshka dolls, a mystery within a mystery. Revealing their mutual attraction inch-by-inch, ""The Bitter Half"" uncovers a topographical map of seductions, of stratified assumptions and amorphousness. Toby Olson's latest work of fiction is rich in strangeness and erotic delight, a delectation to be enjoyed one layer at a time.

By turns romantic and disquieting, Toby Olson's Walking weaves the real and the imagined into a chilling, occasionally hopeful tapestry. Set on an imaginary peninsula on the New England coast, Walking presents a lyrical, nightmarish, and unexpected world, replete with ski mountains, flocks of sheep, and a weeklong Day of the Dead festival. In the midst of this strange place lives Aphrodite, a woman raised by a disturbing father whose gaze seemed to follow her everywhere. Now an adult, Aphrodite is always walking, still trying to escape his stare.An unstable narrator, Aphrodite plunges readers into a story where the characters she imagines blend seamlessly with a real world beyond her control. As the peninsula's idiosyncratic citizens converge for the Day of the Dead celebrations, the connections between their lives and Aphrodite's father slowly become clear. And when her father appears, he sets in motion a terrifying chain of events that force each character to face demons from their past and to decide what kind of future they want to live in.

In 2014, Toby Olson's wife Miriam died at the age 80, and after nearly 50 years of marriage. She had suffered from Alzheimer's for some years before her death and Toby became her principal carer. This is a memoir of that period, a story of love and frustration, remembering and forgetting. Miriam is The Other Woman of the title - a woman other than the one she once was. "With each seemingly tiny insignificant detail (his wife's chant "little little little little little little") Olson lets us in to the unfathomable reverberations of his feeling, and I will not soon forget the constellations he has unfolded." - Meredith Quartermain

Death Sentences is Toby Olson's first major collection since Darklight (Shearsman, 2007), and many of the poems herein are addressed to his wife, Miriam, who died, after suffering for years from Alzheimer's disease, in 2014. Many of the other poems, typical of Olson's concerns, stand as celebrations of what is observed, without metaphor or other literary devices intervening. The four series-Death Sentences, I Don't Know, Disturbed and Etudes-are highly structured experiments with the sentence.

Toby Olson began writing poetry while in high school and he continued writing it while in the U.S. Navy, and later as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He received a Master's Degree at Long Island University in New York, after which he taught Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. His first novel was The Life of Jesus, and this was followed by eleven books of fiction and many books of poetry. He considers himself a poet who also writes fiction, and now, in his mid-eighties, he continues in the writing of both arts. The first books included in this volume were published by Walter Hamady's Perishable Press, and these were followed by books issued by Karl Young's Membrane Press, Barlenmir House, Doctor Generosity's Press, Landlocked Press, Permanent Press, and New Directions. The period covered is 1969-1984.

Toby Olson began writing poetry while in high school and he continued writing it while in the U.S. Navy, and later as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He received a Master's Degree at Long Island University in New York, after which he taught Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. His first novel was 'The Life of Jesus', and this was followed by eleven books of fiction and many books of poetry. He considers himself a poet who also writes fiction, and now, in his mid-eighties, he continues in the writing of both arts. Though there were poems written in the years between 1983 and 94, most of his efforts in those eleven years were spent writing fiction. Four novels were published in that time, and come 1994 he found he had enough poems for a book, Unfinished Building, and while he continued with fiction, he also found he was writing poetry, and since then he has managed to work at both arts. This volume, including the aforementioned book, contains the collections 'Human Nature' (New Directions), 'Darklight' and 'Death Sentences' (both from Shearman Books), and 'See / Saw', published here for the first time.

Twenty-four short stories by Toby Olson are collected here for the first time. They move effortlessly from depictions of American working-class and suburban life to wondrous and sometimes grotesque surrealism, but always with an undertone of humanity and humour. This selection, spanning Olson's career, forms a fine introduction to the work of this noted contemporary novelist and poet. The edition includes an introduction by British scholar Ian Brinton, setting the work in context.

Author of ten novels (among others The Life of Jesus, Seaview and Utah) and over 20 collections of poetry (including We Are the Fire - Selected Poems, and Human Nature, both from New Directions), Toby Olson's new collection demonstrates that the passage of time has only sharpened his narrative voice. Toby Olson is a story-teller, puckish and avuncular by turns, and this new collection will delight his many admirers. Toby Olson has published nine novels, the most recent of which, The Bitter Half, appeared from Fiction Collective-2 in 2006, and twenty books of poetry, including Human Nature (New Directions, 2000). The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olson's novel Seaview received the PEN/Faulkner award for The Most Distinguished Work of American Fiction in 1983. Toby Olson lives in Philadelphia and in North Truro, on Cape Cod.