Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds is an American poet whose frank, often autobiographical verse explores family, sexuality, the body, and intimate relationships.
Confessional poetry: A mode of poetry that foregrounds personal experience, intimate subjects, and the poet’s speaking voice. Olds is often associated with this tradition, though her work extends beyond its usual boundaries.
The Dead and the Living: Sharon Olds’s 1984 poetry collection, which explores family, violence, sexuality, and mortality. This collection established many of the subjects and formal habits associated with her work.
Robert Lowell: An American poet whose confessional work made personal and family history a central subject of modern poetry. Lowell’s example helped establish the literary context in which Olds’s autobiographical poems were received.
National Book Critics Circle Award: An annual American literary prize presented by book critics for distinguished works in several categories. Olds received its poetry award for The Dead and the Living in 1984.
Free verse: Poetry without a regular pattern of meter or rhyme, shaped instead by rhythms of speech and lineation. Her conversational lines use enjambment and pacing to give intimate disclosures a spoken force.
The Father: Sharon Olds’s 1992 poetry collection centered on her father’s illness, dying, and death. The book develops her sustained, unsparing poetic examination of a difficult family bond.
Sylvia Plath: An American poet known for intensely personal poems marked by compressed imagery and psychological force. Her work offers a prominent point of comparison for Olds’s candor about private experience.
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: An annual Pulitzer Prize recognizing a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. Olds won the prize for Stag’s Leap in 2013.
Lyric poetry: Poetry that presents a speaker’s thoughts, feelings, or perceptions in a concentrated form. The lyric mode lets Olds turn personal memories into sharply focused scenes and reflections.
Stag’s Leap: Sharon Olds’s 2012 poetry collection about the end of her marriage. Its poems trace separation through intimate domestic details rather than abstract argument.