Reviews for Satan Says

The average rating for Satan Says based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-04-23 00:00:00 Michele Blom This is a vivid, unforgettable set of debut poems - Sharon Olds' first published collection. She covers childhood, womanhood, mothering, and a journey period. The abuse she and her sister suffered from their father, the somewhat shifty presence of her own mother, her reluctance to be a mother and then being inside of it, all of it is honest and descriptively told. A few excerpts from random poems: "I did not understand his doom or my taste for the big dangerous body." "I have known the Republican living rooms...." "Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back." "I would kill for you. I remind myself it won't be necessary." "She was home, then. This was her place, the one of all the others where she feared to walk, where someone had always arrived first, and would hold it against her at any cost."

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-14 00:00:00 Stephen Proffitt I've liked Sharon Olds for years, and poets and poetry readers have recommended this, her first book, as 1) her best and 2) one not to be missed. I'm right there with them on the "not to be missed" but maybe The Dead and the Living is still my favorite, just because it was the first book of hers that I read. I very much appreciate the final poem, "Prayer," asking to "be faithful to the central meanings" of all the poems in this book, and there follows a list of themes and images that do stay central in later books, as I know from reading them! Sex, children, childbirth, fears, the centrality of woman's experience. A few images: "hot needle of / milk piercing my nipple," "bright / sweat glazing us with resin." Resin and rosin repeat in this book, daughters, mothers, water. Satan is here, briefly. Walt Whitman, more than once. Oh, how I love "Five-Year-Old Boy." I will quote from the end of it: .... He stands on the porch, peeing into the grass, watching a bird fly around the house, and ends up pissing on the front door. Afterwards he twangs his penis. Long after the last drops fly into the lawn, he stands there gently rattling his dick, his face full of intelligence, his white, curved forehead slightly puckered in thought, his eyes clear, gazing out over the pond, his mouth firm and serious; abstractedly he shakes himself once more and the house collapses to the ground behind him. I had to pause after this and sit there laughing, gently laughing in utter joy. I was giggling all through and watching, as the mother/poet must have watched, in quiet respect for the 5-year-old boy, but then I laughed out loud. I loved reading this now, knowing it was her first book, and spying the odd, sometimes weak line breaks (some she says she regrets, but they seem to reinforce natural rhythms of thought, breathing, or speech, so I don't really mind them), those central obsessions and meanings and that's something I so admire and, nowadays, yearn for in contemporary poetry--meanings, the willingness and ability to mean.