The One Girl at the Boys Party (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Sharon Olds
- First Published: 1984
- Type of Work: Poem
- Genres: Poetry
- Subjects: United States or Americans, Mothers, Parents and children, Sex or sexuality, Parties
In the slender action of the twenty-one lines that make up “The One Girl at the Boys Party,” Olds combines three patterns of imagery that underscore the speaker's recognition of her daughter's approaching maturity. In the poem, the speaker (that this is the mother is never explicitly stated) takes the girl, a superior math student, to a swimming party where boys immediately surround her. The speaker sees the young people dive into the pool and imagines her daughter working math problems in her head to calculate her relationship to the diving board and the gallons of water in the...
[The entire page is 635 words long]
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