Sharon Olds' poems [in Satan Says] are perpetually balanced at the edge of hyperbolic violence—a balance maintained between the deep psychological sources of her poems and the vivid, many-layered imagery in which they are expressed…. There are poems of extreme emotions, and though Olds occasionally becomes mired in her own tendency toward bombast, the many poems that achieve their proper mixture of reality and nightmare are simply stunning.

Sara Plath, in a review of "Satan Says," in Booklist, Vol. 77, No. 1, September, 1980, p. 26.