Sharon Olds
Quick answer: Sharon Olds poetry craft: fearless bodily detail, long enjambed sentences and family as subject. Techniques working poets can borrow and practise.
Sharon Olds writes about the body, the family and the marriage bed with a frankness that still startles readers four decades after her debut. Born in San Francisco in 1942, she published Satan Says in 1980, and The Dead and the Living won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984. Stag's Leap, her book about the end of her thirty-year marriage, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 and made her the first American woman to win the T. S. Eliot Prize.
It is easy to talk about Olds as a poet of brave subject matter and miss the engine room. Her poems are technical feats: enormous single sentences, similes arriving in flurries, and a narrator who travels through time inside her own family history. All of it can be studied and borrowed.
Who she is
Olds studied at Stanford and took a doctorate at Columbia, then famously vowed to give up everything she had learned if she could write her own poems. She taught for many years in the graduate writing programme at New York University, where she also helped run a long-standing workshop for wounded veterans.
Her books tend to be organised around a single relationship: a violent childhood in The Father and elsewhere, motherhood, the long marriage and its end in Stag's Leap. The consistency of subject makes her development of technique unusually visible from book to book.
The signature moves
Read three Olds poems in a row and you will start to see the same tools recurring.
What you can learn
Try the single-sentence poem. Choose a charged memory and write it as one grammatical sentence of at least fourteen lines, breaking lines so that each break renews the reader's suspense. You will learn more about enjambment in that exercise than in a month of tidy quatrains.
Then practise simile flurries: describe one physical object with three comparisons in four lines, each image sharper than the last. And test her time-travel move by writing yourself into a scene from your family's past that you never witnessed. Poems like these tend to score well on emotion and language in contests, and Writory's monthly prompt is a low-stakes place to see how such a poem reads to strangers.
Where to start reading
Start with The Dead and the Living, then Stag's Leap for the late style at full power. The Father is her most concentrated book, a single sequence about a parent's dying. I Go Back to May 1937 is the essential single poem, and Selected Poems offers the broad view. Her work reads best in book-length runs, where the recurring subjects gather force.
What poets can take from this
- Draft a whole poem as one long sentence and let line breaks manage the reader's breath.
- When one simile feels weak, add two more that sharpen it instead of deleting it.
- Write about bodies with anatomical precision; accuracy moves readers more than daring.
- Enter family scenes you never saw and narrate them in present tense.
- Keep the speaker's tone level while the content burns; the contrast does the work.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in one continuous sentence that enters a scene from your parents' or grandparents' lives before you were born. Describe what they wear, what they cannot know yet, and what you would tell them if the poem allowed you to speak.
Questions
What is Sharon Olds famous for?
For unflinching poems about the body, childhood, marriage and family, written in long enjambed sentences. Stag's Leap, about her divorce, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Is Sharon Olds a confessional poet?
She is often described that way because her material is intimate and autobiographical, though she has resisted the label. Her craft, especially the controlled long sentence and dense simile, matters as much as the candour.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.