Bücher von Toby Olson

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.

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.

Death Sentences is Toby Olson's first major collection since Darklight (2007), and many of the poems are addressed to his wife, Miriam, who died in 2014. Many of the other poems stand as celebrations of what is observed, without metaphor or other literary devices intervening. The four series are highly structured experiments with the sentence.

In 2014, Miriam Olson died at the age 80, and after nearly 50 years of marriage. She had suffered from Alzheimer's for some years 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.