Human Nature: Poems: 897 (New Directions Paperbook) - Softcover

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 lives in Philadelphia and North Truro, on Cape Cod, where he has done most of his writing over the past thirty-six years. He was born near Chicago in 1937, but left there at a young age. Through high school and his four years in the Navy as a surgical technician, he lived in California, Arizona, and Texas, and after finishing his BA in English and Philosophy at Occidental College in Los Angeles, he moved to New York City, where he received an MA from Long Island University. Olson taught at the Aspen Writers' Workshop, which he co- founded in the mid-sixties, and at Long Island University and The New School For Social Research before moving to Philadelphia and Temple University in 1975. Olson began writing poetry in the early sixties, but it was not until 1976 that his first novel, The Life of Jesus, was published (by New Directions). Seaview, for which he received the PEN/Faulkner Award for the most distinguished work of American fiction in 1983, followed, and since then he has published the novels The Woman Who Escaped From Shame, UTAH (Green Integer, 2003), Dorit in Lesbos, At Sea, WRITE LETTER TO BILLY (Coffee House Press, 2000), The Blond Box and The Bitter Half. Numerous books of Olson's poetry have been published, including CHANGING APPEARANCE (Membrane Press, 1975), We Are the Fire, Unfinished Building and his most recent title, Human Nature (New Directions, 2000). He is the author of the memoir THE OTHER WOMAN (Shearsman Books, 2015).