Sharon Olds, America’s Brave Poet of the Body | Literary Hub

It is that first word-brave-which is most often leaned on when speaking of Olds' work. In an already intimate art, she is still willing to go the furthest, the deepest, and unflinchingly claims what is so often used to shame women and celebrates it. "I have lain down and sweated and shaken / and passed blood and shit and water / and slowly alone in the center of a circle I have / passed the new person out," she wrote in "The Language of the Brag," one of the poems those editors rejected long ago. She went on to write of all the things she was told not to: mothering, marrying, care-taking, loving, losing, and letting go. In books like The Dead and the Living and The Gold Cell she turned these acts into a mythology of lucid pain and praise, entwining the two in lines so oracular it takes close study to realize they are often written in perfect four-four time, syntax so finely tuned and torqued you also think movement down the page should feel this easy, this inevitable. In her Pulitzer- and T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection, Stag's Leap, Olds used these gifts to chronicle the worst kind of subtraction-of love-into a linked series so fierce it found a way to redefine the exit wounds of love.