SOURCE: "The Tune of Crisis," in Poetry, Vol. CXLIX, No. 4, January, 1987, pp. 231-37.

Ostriker is an American poet, critic, editor, and educator. In the following excerpt, she praises Old's use of intimate autobiographical details and vivid imagery in The Gold Cell.

The opening section of Sharon Olds's The Gold Cell contains some of her most haunting poems. A white woman faces a black youth with the "casual cold look of a mugger" on the subway and considers how deeply they are in each other's power. Some policemen coax a suicide from his parapet on a hot night, and they light cigarettes whose "red, glowing ends burned like the / tiny campfires we lit at night / back at the beginning of the world." Some Ugandan villagers during a drought are beating to death a food-thief whose head-wounds are "ripe and wet as a / rich furrow cut back and cut back...