“Sharon Olds has consistently served as a sense-making machine. For 30 years and over ten volumes of poetry, she’s documented both her family of origin and the family she helped to create, exploring the tension between the two to great effect. Where relationships become complicated by violence she has transcended the victim/perpetrator binary, humanizing her subjects, and negotiating the dim territory where ideas about right and wrong conflict with lived experience. This ability to speak from a conflicted perspective has become a trademark, established in her first book, Satan Says, “I love him too, / you know… I love them but / I’m trying to say what happened to us”.”
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