Satan Says

Reviews / Votes

Satan Says is both a lighthouse and a box of shadows. It is more than a book; it is the original mother plant where all the seeds have come from. Brave and brilliant, Satan Says changes everyone who reads it. It is a permission slip to be free, made in the shape of a poem. No one has ever been the same. -- Ada Limon, 24th Poet Laureate of the United States and author of The Hurting Kind Olds's brilliant 1980 debut collection threw down a gauntlet with its transgressive title poem, a taboo-busting attempt to write her way out of the abusive confines of her childhood, both recalling and transcending the confessional poetry of Plath and Sexton. Several decades, collections, and awards later, the audacious candor and raw physicality of lines that course with blood, milk, sweat, and feces are perhaps less striking than the startling originality of Olds's figurative language. In four sections that trace the poet's cyclical progress from "Daughter" to "Woman" to "Mother" and onward on her "Journey," Olds trains her unsparing lens like a war correspondent of humankind's innermost struggles, transfixing readers with glaring and often surreal images that lay bare the deepest truths. While her merciless tone can be "black as Emma Bovary's bile," there are glimpses of sly wit, as when she teases Whitman and Ginsberg in surpassing them at "this giving birth, this glistening verb." From its frank opening salvo to its closing prayer that she remain "faithful to the central meanings," Olds's extraordinary debut beautifully prefigures her subsequent career as one of the United States' most sublime poets of embodied existence. Olds's many fans will rejoice to see this once-inflammatory little paperback dressed up in a handsome hardcover, lovingly introduced by fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Diane Seuss. * Library Journal * Satan Says enlarged our vision of our own lives and gave us a magnifying lens through which we could reexamine our own fears, pleasures, and victories. It changed our thinking. It changed our language. Sharon Olds moved American poetry fifty years closer to our bodies and our hearts. -- Toi Derricotte, author of I: New and Selected Poems Satan Says is the single most earth-shattering book of my writing life. With the words, 'I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,' Sharon Olds busted down the walls of the white male poetry mafia. They labeled her 'confessional,' and I felt her brilliant courage through my body. When I think of Olds writing this astonishing book in 1980, who am I to be afraid? -- Jan Beatty, author of Dragstripping In Satan Says, Sharon Olds peels language down to its red, thudding heart. Olds gives us heat, shadow, and the strange, sweet bloom of daring the body to speak its truths. -- Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees When I moved back to California in 2006 to begin teaching in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University, my office was just steps away from the Poetry Center. 'These are the folks who saw the genius of Satan Says,' I thought, and I remember visiting the Poetry Center to sit in their comfy chairs and re-read this remarkable book by Sharon Olds. So direct and honest and unflinching it never fails to take my breath away, Satan Says was one of the first grown-up books of poetry I ever loved. -- Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden It is hard to state the importance of this book to me as a poet. It not only shows me what can be said in a poem, but it shows me how one might go about saying it, how one might live in the difficult spaces necessary for speaking truth to power. Diane Seuss's introduction reinforces the enduring importance of Satan Says in our divisive, contemporary moment. -- Aaron Smith, author of Stop Lying In Satan Says, Sharon Olds convincingly, and with astonishing vigor, presents a world which, if not always hostile, is never clear about which face it will show her. * American Book Review * The poems are constructed with craft and care; the volatility of childhood seemingly is tempered with controlled retrospection and craft. . . . Olds's voice is original. It is even savage at times, but always controlled. * Choice Reviews * The republication of Satan Says is cause for celebration and reflection. * London Grip *