Books

Joan Price bills herself as the “senior sexpert,” a phrase that captures her late life career as an advocate for senior sexuality and the author of several non-fiction books on the subject. In Ageless Erotica, Price has collected well-written short stories about eroticism in later life, by both men and women. These stories cover a wide range of sexual orientation, gender identification, and realism alongside magic. All of the stories share a joy in the bodies we have now: Exploring them, rediscovering them, longing to share them.

This is one of the few books I am including that also has work by men. When you read it, pay attention to how the stories differ by gender – and how much they have in common. The notes about authors at the end of the book provide many ways to explore and connect with people who celebrate sexuality throughout our lives.

All We Know of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica by Women is a hugely satisfying collection edited by Enid Shomer and published by Carolina Wren Press.

It’s intriguing in part because the book is divided by the age of the poets and their subjects.
Part I, The Discovery of Sex, is all about first longing.
Part II, The Ordinary Day Begins, is about sex in the years of active motherhood.
Part III, When this Old Body, is of course my favorite and the part I read first.

“And suddenly, again, I want the long road of your thigh,” writes Jane Hirshfield of the desire that comes in long knowing.

“our bodies move and join / unbearably. / your face above me / is the face of all the gods / and beautiful demons,” writes Lenore Kandel, reminding us of the timelessness of lust.

“Neither of them was young. His beard was gray… But they kissed lavish kisses like the ocean in the early morning… We couldn’t look away,” writes Ellen Bass about a couple reunited at the Portland airport. These fine poems capture what it is to be a woman in love with life across its full span.

Former 1980s rock hopeful Libby Conlin has long since buried her music — until her newly divorced daughter posts the old recordings online and the industry comes calling. As her past resurfaces, mother and daughter remake their lives in a story about second acts and redefining love.

This is an anthology of works performed at the (now sadly defunct) Octopus Literary Salon in Oakland, California, at readings of erotica by women over fifty. The Dirty Old Women reading series pushes San Francisco Bay Area culture in the direction of celebrating sexuality after menopause. This volume is a varied collection from the readings, with stories, book excerpts, and poetry.

Full disclosure: My short story, “Terraforming,” is included in this collection. Many of the other stories were written by friends, so naturally I am fond of this volume for personal reasons as well as the fun read it undoubtedly is. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, or if you travel there, check out the Dirty Old Women reading schedule (usually the 4th Tuesday of the month).

Two women in their 70s have been best friends since childhood, summering on a wild Maine peninsula they have vowed to protect from development. Alice Elliott Dark’s sweeping novel is about female friendship, legacy, secrets, and the question of what we owe the places and people we love most.

A fictionalized life of Japanese poet Yosano Akiko, who defied her era’s constraints to become a pioneering feminist and the first to render The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese. Through poverty, betrayal, earthquake, and fire, her fierce devotion to art wounds her daughter — and she sets out to make amends before it’s too late.

Why it’s here: It follows Akiko across a whole life into older age — an unflinching portrait of a woman artist aging and trying to repair what her ambition cost.

A debut poetry collection of 30 poems written over 30 days, charting the raw terrain of midlife transformation — grief, shifting family roles, career change, and personal reinvention. Written by Jacqueline (Jack) Pérez, who discovered poetry at 60 and founded the pro-aging platform Kuel Life, it speaks directly to women over 50 ready to embrace what comes next.

Hilary Stevens, a poet in her seventies, submits to a day of interviews and ends up reviewing an entire life: the marriage, the women she loved, and where the poems came from. This is the novel in which Sarton wrote openly about lesbian love, at genuine professional cost to herself.

I have been a fan of Sharon Olds‘ poetry ever since she spoke out about incest in her collection, The Dead and the Living (1983). Her work is incredibly incisive, beautifully crafted, and utterly unblinking, even as she examines subjects we are discouraged from mentioning, much less capturing in poetry.

The personal nature of Olds‘ poetry, her focus on her children, her marriage, and her own sexuality, has made her controversial throughout her career. Yet she has persevered, and later in her career won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer for Stag’s Leap, her 2012 volume about the end of her long marriage.

In her 2016 book “Odes,” the poet explores sexuality from her vantage point as a woman in her sixties. Poems like “Blow Job Ode,” and “Ode to the Clitoris,” continue her saga of making the personal poetic.

These poems make it clear that being a certain age is no reason to stop examining (and enjoying) sexuality.

Piercy at eighty-four, writing poems about cats, cooking, marriage, the dead, and her own approaching end with no softening whatsoever. The late work of a poet who has been documenting women lives since the 1960s.

During the Great Depression, young dancers Mattie and Kip tap for coins and ride the rails until betrayal and disaster separate them for a lifetime. Now ninety-nine, Mattie finally tells her granddaughter the whole story.

Alma Cruz, a novelist in her sixties, retires from teaching and writing and buries her unfinished manuscripts in a plot of land, whereupon the characters begin to talk. A book about what a completed career leaves undone, written by Alvarez at seventy-four.

Southern women in a locked-down senior community reinvent their love lives in thirteen tales of friendly vampires, sexy demons, and dream lovers — plus eight bonus stories of vibrant women from New York to California.

Poems written after the death of Peacock’s husband, refusing what she calls the received idea of a widow’s mauve existence. Covers the long caregiving before the loss as well as the color that returns after it.

Unmasked: Women Write about Sex and Intimacy After Fifty

This book is part fiction, part essay, part poetry. The project was designed to help raise the level of visibility of the sexuality of women past fifty, and includes a wide variety of styles and approaches. The poems have some great lines to launch our thoughts into new creations.

I can’t do better than quote the authors “This collection of essays and poetry is meant to bring sex after fifty for women into the open, to proclaim that it is important, it is natural and healthy and, for some women, it is absolutely necessary. Unmasked will surprise, inform, and–it is hoped–encourage all women of a certain age to (re)discover their sexuality.”

Read this book to spark your thinking as well as your artistic side.

Shunned as a medieval healer and rescued by a vampire, Marion Chase joins a sisterhood devoted to ethical living. Five centuries later she runs a Chicago blood bank with a hidden sideline — until she falls for the one person who could destroy her.