Feeling, not thinking, despite the ode to thought. Images, not stories. Very sexy, but aren't we all? Full of wonderful lines you won't forget, such as this line, from "A Celibate's Ode to Balls."

I missed the two who are with the one
which enters, while they do not enter,
they loll intense.
( )

An unusual and ingenious book of odes — poems of praise and celebration — to a wide range of topics: the hymen, the clitoris, the penis, Stanley Kunitz, buttermilk, legs, wind, broken loyalty.

Lots of sex and death and queasy-making subjects. Many of these poems didn’t do it for me. Some struck me as over-the-top, exaggerated praise that just didn’t come off. And I did mutter, more than once, “Enough already about the nether regions!” But there are many poems here that I liked a lot — for their candor, inventiveness, and their intense and surprising language.

Olds has been called confessional. She’s been called exhibitionist. Her work has been called gynecological. Here, as usual, the poet is unsentimental, unapologetic, boundary-pushing, and proud of it.

My favorite in the collection is the beautiful and tender Stanley Kunitz Ode. I also greatly enjoyed the odes to wattles, fat, and stretch marks. The aging female body (“the thrilling unloveliness of an elderwoman’s aging”) here becomes a subject of interest, appreciation, reverence, and sometimes downright revelry. There is a lot of good humor in these pages.

“ . . . and now the earth
provides, on my body, more and more signs:
No Fishing. No Eggs. Out of Milk.”

— from “Merkin Ode” ( )

There are odes to all sorts of things here: toxic shock, whiskers, stretch marks, the female reproductive system, a composting toilet, the vagina, balls, menstrual blood - everything you can imagine.