One Secret Thing

A memorable collection

M Wynn Thomas, The Guardian

Sharon Olds's poems are pure fire in the hands - risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the roughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss

Michael Ondaatje

As devastatingly accurate in its depiction of our deepest wishes and secret inner lives as we have come to expect from this brilliant and fearless poet

Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year

Her best work exhibits a lyrical acuity which is both purifying and redemptive. She sees description as a means to catharsis, and the result is impossible to forget... Sharon Olds is enormously self-aware; her poetry is remarkable for its candour, its eroticism, and its power to move

David Leavitt

She has written without embarassment or apology, with remarkable passion and savagery and nerve, poems about family and family pathology, early erotic fascination and sexual life inside marriage

Amy Hempel