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.

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

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.

The action of Toby Olson's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel "Seaview" sweeps eastward, following three men and two women across a wasted American continent to an apocalyptic confrontation on Cape Cod. Melinda hopes to reach the seaside where she was born before she dies of cancer. Allen, her husband, earns their way back by golf hustling, working the links en route. Outside of Tucson, the two meet up with a Pima Indian also headed toward the Cape to help a distant relative who has claims on a golf course there that is laid out on tribal grounds. Throughout the journey, Allen knows he is being stalked by a former friend, Richard, a drug-pusher whom he has crossed and who is now determined to murder him. The tortured lives of Richard and his wife Gerry stand as a dream of what might have become of Allen and Melinda had things been otherwise. The lines that draw these people together converge at Seaview Links, and on the mad battlefield that this golf course becomes, the novel reaches its complex ending. "Seaview's" vibrant language and fateful plot make this study of an America on the edge an unforgettable read.