SOURCE: A review of The Gold Cell, in The Yale Review, Vol. 77, No. 1, Autumn, 1987, pp. 140-47.

Yenser is an American critic, educator, and poet. In the following excerpt, he examines stylistic and thematic aspects of The Gold Cell, noting that the volume exemplifies a candid narrative handling of painful subject matter.

"We're here to learn / the earth by heart and everything is crying / mind me, mind me!" That is [Alice] Fulton's Rilkean credo in "Everyone Knows the World Is Ending." In "Little Things," in The Gold Cell, Sharon Olds has her own version: "I am / paying attention to small beauties, / whatever I have—as if it were our duty to / find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world." How divergent their means of minding and binding are, a couple of poems about early sexual experience will suggest. Fulton's "Scumbling" is a lustrous, dreamy lyric, one of...