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Early in her career Sharon Olds sent poems to a literary magazine and got back a note suggesting she try Ladies’ Home Journal: “The true subjects of poetry are … male subjects, not your children.” She kept writing about her children, and about her father, her mother, sex, birth and death. Her first book, Satan Says, came out in 1980, when she was 37. Her second, The Dead and the Living, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and has sold more than 50,000 copies, a rare number for poetry. Three decades later Stag’s Leap, about the end of her marriage, won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer. This guide covers her thirteen key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 13 key books · 1980–2022 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Sharon Olds has published thirteen books of poetry between 1980 and 2022. Her best-known are Stag’s Leap (2012), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, The Dead and the Living (1984) and The Father (1992). Start with Stag’s Leap; below you will find which book to read next, whether you want the family poems, the selected poems or her latest work.
Where to Start with Sharon Olds
If you want her defining book
→ Stag’s Leap (2012) — the Pulitzer-winning poems about the end of her marriage.
If you want the best of four decades in one volume
→ Strike Sparks (2004) — her selected poems, 1980–2002.
If you want the family poems that made her name
→ The Dead and the Living (1984) — the 1984 book that won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
If you want a single sustained sequence
→ The Father (1992) — her father’s illness and death, poem by poem.
13 Sharon Olds Books, in Order
Satan Says
Her first collection, published in the Pitt Poetry Series when she was 37. Its sections follow the speaker as daughter, woman and mother, and its frank sexual content startled early readers. It won the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award, and the University of Pittsburgh Press reissued it in 2025 in a 45th-anniversary edition introduced by Diane Seuss.
The Dead and the Living
Poems about childhood, love, marriage and children, alongside poems for the dead, including victims of political violence. Chosen as the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983, it went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award and has sold more than 50,000 copies, among the best-selling volumes of contemporary poetry.
The Gold Cell
Her third collection moves between public and private: poems prompted by newspaper reports of rape and abandoned babies, poems about her father and her daughter, and poems about her own body. It contains “I Go Back to May 1937”, in which she imagines going back to see her parents as students before they married.
The Father
A sequence about her father’s death from cancer, following his illness in order and describing his body closely. The alcoholic, distant father of her earlier poems is now the whole subject, and the poems move towards a reckoning with him. It was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The Wellspring
The book moves through a life in order: childhood and her strained relationship with her parents, adolescence and sexual awakening, her own children, and finally love in a long marriage and how it changes over time.
Blood, Tin, Straw
Seventy poems in five sections of fourteen, named Blood, Tin, Straw, Fire and Light. Olds writes again as lover, mother and daughter, on sex, childbirth and death, with a few poems turned outwards, to a girl burned by napalm and to the crew of the space shuttle Challenger.
The Unswept Room
The title poem describes a feast pictured in floor mosaics in a Roman museum. Critics read the book as a midlife collection, calmer than her earlier work, still about the body and family but with the mother drawn in a more uncertain light. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Strike Sparks
A selection from her first seven books, from Satan Says to The Unswept Room. The Poetry Foundation notes it was widely praised as a good introduction to her major themes. The title echoes a phrase from the end of “I Go Back to May 1937”.
One Secret Thing
Presented by her publisher as the book that completes her cycle of family poems. It opens with images of war before turning to home, and the portrait of her mother changes across the book, which ends in elegies. It was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize.
Stag’s Leap
In 1997, after about thirty years of marriage, her husband told her he was leaving her for another woman. These poems follow the year before the parting and the year after, from shock and anger towards acceptance; she waited some fifteen years to publish them. The title comes from a wine label showing a leaping stag. It won the T. S. Eliot Prize, making her the first female American poet to do so, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Odes
Praise songs to things rarely praised in poetry, inspired by Pablo Neruda’s odes to common things. It opens with “Ode to the Hymen” and includes “Ode to the Penis”, “Ode of Withered Cleavage”, “Hip Replacement Ode” and “Pine Tree Ode”.
Arias
Opens with an elegy for Trayvon Martin and sets poems about abuse, miscarriage, divorce and the death of loved ones beside poems on whiteness and her own privilege. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Balladz
Published in her 80th year, in five sections: “Quarantine”, “Amherst Balladz”, “Balladz”, “Album from a Previous Existence” and “Elegies”, the last mourning people she knew. It moves between love, family and the COVID-19 pandemic, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
In What Order to Read Sharon Olds
Olds returns to the same people across her books: her father and mother, her children, her husband, her own body. Read in publication order, the books follow that family over four decades, from the childhood poems of Satan Says and The Dead and the Living, through her father’s death in The Father and the changing portrait of her mother in One Secret Thing, to the end of her marriage in Stag’s Leap and the late books.
You do not have to start at the beginning. Stag’s Leap stands on its own as a story with a beginning and end. If you would rather sample everything first, Strike Sparks collects the best of the first seven books in one volume.
A reading path
1. Stag’s Leap (2012)
2. The Dead and the Living (1984)
3. The Father (1992)
4. Strike Sparks (2004)
5. Balladz (2022)
Everything Else Sharon Olds Published
Beyond the 13 key books: 4 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Selections published in Britain
2
2 books · 1987–1991
- 1987The Matter of This Worldnew and selected poems, Slow Dancer Press
- 1991The Sign of Saturnpoems 1980–1987, Secker & Warburg
The years · 1942–2022
Quick facts about Sharon Olds
- Known for
- She writes candid, physical poems about family, sex and the body, and is credited with giving younger poets, especially women, permission to write about their private lives
- 1942
- Born in San Francisco, California
- 1980
- First book, Satan Says, at 37
- 1998
- New York State Poet, 1998–2000
- 2012
- Stag’s Leap
- 2022
- Balladz, a National Book Award finalist
- Born
- 19 November 1942, San Francisco, California
- Education
- BA, Stanford University (1964); PhD in English, Columbia University (1972)
- Family
- Married David Douglas Olds in 1968; two children, including the actor Gabriel Olds. Divorced in 1997
- Teaching
- Graduate Creative Writing Program, New York University; helped found NYU workshops for residents of a Roosevelt Island hospital and for veterans
- Honours
- National Book Critics Circle Award (1984), T. S. Eliot Prize (2012), Pulitzer Prize (2013), Wallace Stevens Award (2016), Frost Medal (2022)
- Offices
- New York State Poet (1998–2000); Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2006–2012)
The red mark is 2012: Stag’s Leap, the book that won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.
How Sharon Olds Writes: Telling About It
Olds writes in the first person about what happened in her own house: an alcoholic, often abusive father, a mother too afraid to protect the children, her own marriage, sex and the birth of her children. She describes bodies in close, physical detail, in long free-verse lines. A New York Times reviewer called her work “almost Whitmanesque” in its delight in the physical.
She is often grouped with the confessional poets, but she has said she was more influenced by Galway Kinnell, Muriel Rukeyser and Gwendolyn Brooks than by Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath, whose “steps were not steps I wanted to put my feet in.” Her books are often built as sequences: The Father follows an illness to its end, and Stag’s Leap moves from shock and anger towards acceptance.
Not every critic has been won over. Ken Tucker wrote in The New York Times Book Review that she “spends too much time taking her own emotional temperature,” and Adam Kirsch questioned her “sexual bravado”. Her admirers point to her influence instead: the poet Mark Doty wrote that “by writing with such candor and clarity, Olds has granted younger poets—especially women—permission to speak.”
Watch
Sharon Olds on Stag’s Leap
Judy Woodruff talks with Olds for the PBS NewsHour in October 2012 about Stag’s Leap, finding her voice in her thirties and what poetry is for.
Frequently asked questions about Sharon Olds’s books
How many books has Sharon Olds written?
Thirteen books of poetry, all covered on this page, from Satan Says (1980) to Balladz (2022). One of them, Strike Sparks (2004), is a selected poems. Below them are two selections published only in Britain, a shared Penguin Modern Poets volume (2017) and the 45th-anniversary edition of Satan Says (2025).
What are Sharon Olds’s books in order?
Satan Says (1980), The Dead and the Living (1984), The Gold Cell (1987), The Father (1992), The Wellspring (1996), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Unswept Room (2002), Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980–2002 (2004), One Secret Thing (2008), Stag’s Leap (2012), Odes (2016), Arias (2019) and Balladz (2022).
Where should I start with Sharon Olds?
Stag’s Leap (2012), her Pulitzer-winning book about the end of her marriage, which reads as one connected story. For an overview of her earlier work, start with Strike Sparks (2004), her selected poems.
What is Sharon Olds’s most famous book?
Stag’s Leap (2012), which won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Dead and the Living (1984) is her best-selling book, with more than 50,000 copies sold.
What is Stag’s Leap about?
The end of her marriage. In 1997, after about thirty years together, her husband left her for another woman. The poems follow the time before and after the separation, and she waited some fifteen years to publish them. The title comes from a wine label showing a stag leaping from a cliff.
Is Sharon Olds a confessional poet?
She is often compared with confessional poets such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath because she writes openly about family, sex and the body. She has said she was more influenced by Galway Kinnell, Muriel Rukeyser and Gwendolyn Brooks, and that Sexton’s and Plath’s “steps were not steps I wanted to put my feet in.”
Why did Sharon Olds turn down Laura Bush’s invitation?
In 2005 Laura Bush invited her to read at the National Book Festival in Washington and to a White House breakfast. Olds declined in an open letter published in The Nation, objecting to the Iraq war and to the practice of sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured. Of the White House table, she wrote: “I could not stomach it.”
What prizes has Sharon Olds won?
The National Book Critics Circle Award (1984) for The Dead and the Living, and both the T. S. Eliot Prize (2012) and the Pulitzer Prize (2013) for Stag’s Leap; she was the first female American poet to win the Eliot. She has also received the Wallace Stevens Award (2016), the Frost Medal (2022) and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2022). The Unswept Room and Balladz were National Book Award finalists.
Is Sharon Olds still alive?
Yes. She was born on 19 November 1942 in San Francisco and lives in New York City, where she teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University. Her most recent collection is Balladz (2022).
Footnotes
- Sharon Olds — Wikipedia
- Sharon Olds — Poetry Foundation
- Sharon Olds — Academy of American Poets
- Stag’s Leap, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2013 — The Pulitzer Prizes
- Sharon Olds wins the twentieth-anniversary T. S. Eliot Prize — T. S. Eliot Prize
- Open Letter to Laura Bush — The Nation, 2005
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.”
— Sharon Olds, “I Go Back to May 1937”, The Gold Cell (1987)
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