SOURCE: "Four Salvers Salvaging: New Work by Voigt, Olds, Dove, and McHugh," in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 262-76.

In the following excerpt, Harris describes the poems in The Gold Cell as "undeniably gripping," but questions whether the emotional intensity of Olds's verse is merely sensationalistic.

A would-be suicide on the roof of a city building; a subway encounter between a white person and a black who looks, to the speaker, like a mugger; a newborn child left in a garbage can; a torturer castrating someone; 17th-century Siamese twins, one of whom grows from the other's chest; a man being beaten to death for stealing food in Uganda; a rape victim who ends up being a pom-pom girl; talking penises left over from sex change operations; an apocalyptic fantasy about a "sex center" where customers stand under signs indicating their preferences; the nightly devotions of...