Satan Says

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the author of thirteen books of poetry, most recently Balladz,a finalist for the National Book Award; Arias, short-listed for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize; Odes; and Stag’s Leap, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize. Her other honors include the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first book, Satan Says, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second, The Dead and the Living, which was also the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983. The Father was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in England, and The Unswept Room was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU workshop program for residents of Coler-Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. She lives in New York City.

Olds’s brilliant 1980 debut collection threw down a gauntlet with its transgressive title poem, a taboo-busting attempt to write her way out of the abusive confines of her childhood, both recalling and transcending the confessional poetry of Plath and Sexton. Several decades, collections, and awards later, the audacious candor and raw physicality of lines that course with blood, milk, sweat, and feces are perhaps less striking than the startling originality of Olds’s figurative language. In four sections that trace the poet’s cyclical progress from “Daughter” to “Woman” to “Mother” and onward on her “Journey,” Olds trains her unsparing lens like a war correspondent of humankind’s innermost struggles, transfixing readers with glaring and often surreal images that lay bare the deepest truths. While her merciless tone can be “black as Emma Bovary’s bile,” there are glimpses of sly wit, as when she teases Whitman and Ginsberg in surpassing them at “this giving birth, this glistening verb.“ From its frank opening salvo to its closing prayer that she remain “faithful to the central meanings,” Olds’s extraordinary debut beautifully prefigures her subsequent career as one of the United States’ most sublime poets of embodied existence. Olds’s many fans will rejoice to see this once-inflammatory little paperback dressed up in a handsome hardcover, lovingly introduced by fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Diane Seuss.