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Heavenly Seas

Aidan Koch

Issue 213, Summer 2015

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More from Issue 213, Summer 2015

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  • Fiction

    • Chris Bachelder

      The Throwback Special: Part 1

    • Ann Beattie

      Yancey

    • Lucia Berlin

      B.F. and Me

    • Andrés Neuman

      The Things We Don’t Do

    • Michel Houellebecq

      From ‘Submission’

    • Padgett Powell

      Yeltsin Spotted Abroad in a Bar

    • David Szalay

      Youth

    • Deb Olin Unferth

      Voltaire Night

  • Interview

    • Peter Cole

      The Art of Translation No. 5

    • Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

      The Art of Translation No. 4

  • Poetry

    • Coral Bracho

      The Signal of His Urge

    • Xi Chuan

      Awake In Nanjing

    • Xi Chuan

      Mourning Problems

    • Peter Cole

      The Unsure Moralist

    • Iman Mersal

      The Curse of Small Creatures

    • Ishion Hutchinson

      The Difference

    • John Koethe

      The Swimmer

    • Radmila Lazić

      Love

    • Radmila Lazić

      Secret Embroidery

    • D. Nurkse

      First Love

    • D. Nurkse

      Learning To Read

    • D. Nurkse

      The Estonian Classics

    • Nick Twemlow

      Attributed to the Harrow Painter

  • Portfolio

    • Aidan Koch

      Heavenly Seas

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From left, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass, Olds, and Brenda Hillman in the Oakley house at the Community of Writers, Olympic Valley, California, 1989. Courtesy of Sharon Olds and the Community of Writers.

Sharon Olds published her first book, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven. The book is organized into four sections, “Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother,” and “Journey,” and it begins with its title poem, whose speaker is locked in a box she can open only by repeating after Satan: “Say shit, say death, say fuck the father.” At the time, Olds—who was born in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford, and received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia—was married to a psychiatrist, and she spent her days on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, caring for their two young children. Not long after the book’s publication, she told me last year, someone who had invited her to give a reading picked her up at the airport and said, “I thought you would look angrier.”

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Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.

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