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 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."