Sharon Olds has established herself as a major American poet whose themes of sexuality and power as daughter, wife, and mother are of particular importance to women. Besides depicting family life, she describes global and political events with...

Tanner is the author of Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth-Century Fiction. In the following essay, she applies the concept of the gaze in film and literary theory to Olds's description of her terminally ill father in The Father.

In the following essay, Dillon examines Olds's narrative about the relationship between her and her father running throughout Satan Says, The Dead and the Living, and The Gold Cell.

Wright is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following review of The Dead and the Living, she praises Olds's use of unadorned, concrete description to evoke sympathy and love in scenes of domestic violence and trauma.

Essay briefly discusses some of the writing of author Sharon Olds.