Review of The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds

​The poems in Sharon Olds’ The Gold Cell chart out a life in four parts: the impersonal beginning, reflections of the speaker’s father, early sex and love, and finally the speaker as a mother. The collection’s language and imagery are particularly striking in ‘The Food-Thief’ in which the speaker writes, “His lips are open to his brothers as the body of a/woman might be open, as the earth itself was/split”. What’s intriguing about this line and many others in the first three parts of the collection is a drive toward writing about sex—when the poem itself is about a man who stole and is on his way to be drowned. And not only sex, but taboo sex because line above implies the man intends to kiss his brother as if he were a woman.
 
Sex finds itself in many portions of the collection, and most strangely in poems about the father. Maybe the father is seen as a figure so imposing and important, that sex (an inherently power-driven action) is the only way to talk about the father. For example, in ‘Looking at My Father’, the speaker says, “I know [my father’s] a tease,/obsessive, rigid, selfish, sentimental,/but I could look at my father all day”. Then the speaker goes on to describe the father’s head, nose, teeth all in an unsightly way, comparing, “the irises” to “the lip of a live volcano”. Conceding that, “I know he is not perfect but my/body thinks his body is perfect”, which is followed by much more descriptions of desire for the father. The speaker is battling with how her father appears in her life (whether positive or negative) because even though parts of him are unsightly, she still wants him in her life. Sex is then brought into the speaker’s teenage life as she describes her first sexual experiences (i.e. a handjob she gave a boy in ‘First Sex’) to the more sensual descriptions in ‘It’.
 
Because the collection follows the speaker’s growth chronologically, this love transforms from sexual desire to maternal desire in the fourth part. This is where we see the worries of her son and daughters’ injuries against the backdrop of their dead pets. In this way, the speaker’s fears are manifested, even confirmed, when they have to gas the daughter’s gerbils in ‘The Prayer’ or care for their son whom broke him arm in ‘The Green Shirt’. The speaker fears are at their highest when she imagines her daughter being raped in ‘The Quest’ like what happened in ‘The Girl’. Though, in the end the speaker may not have a solution beyond providing her children as much attention and love as possible.
 
The collection’s controversy arrives in the first part with the poem ‘Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor’. In this poem, the speaker describes “a tray/of penises” outside the operating room. The penises then are given voices somewhat comically. One way to read the poem is it’s a critique on how, as a society, we value manly violence when the first penis says, “I am a weapon thrown down. Let there be no more/killing.” In which the speaker is making a comment on how the man and thus the penis is the epicenter of violence. And in the removal of the penis, there is a removal of violence.
 
This is a very generous reading because the last penis in the poem is described as “unhappy”. In this instance, does this mean the penis was forcefully removed from the patient? Is Olds implying people are having sex reassignment surgeries not of their own will? If so, that is a hefty and baseless claim which derives from right-wing fear mongering. Some may say the collection is “Of Its Time”, as it were published in the late eighties, and the politics back then were much cruder. Even still, it wasn’t like trans people didn’t exist back then.
 
Regardless, torrin a. greathouse critiques Olds’ poem noting its transphobia in, ‘In an Operating Room Outside of the Cis Woman’s Imagination’. greathouse notes how Olds’ poem uses language of removal and absence. That Olds states something—a body part—was lost. greathouse retorts by saying, “After anesthesia, nothing is removed. Nothing wasted. Instead, skin/budded inward, a rose blooming into its own mouth.” greathouse notes that Olds has no authority on how trans bodies undergoing surgery should be described and interpreted. Even if the poem’s intent wasn’t to provide an opinion on trans bodies, the poem’s image was then a sloppy choice.
 
In fact, the poem’s inclusion in the collection is strange with how out of sync its structure and satirical voice reads after ‘The Girl’. And even still, what’s interesting about this poem is how it speaks to another portion of the collection. If read in isolation, the poem is frankly not all that strong. It relies on the situation of penis’s talking to keep the reader’s attention. Like, isn’t it funny that this penis wants to be painted in a still life—oh and look at this penis, it thinks it’s a dirty dog and needs to be put down. However, if contextualized against, say ‘Alcatraz’, maybe there was reason for Olds to include it. The first line of ‘Alcatraz’ reads, “When I was a girl, I knew I was a man”. Following this line, the speaker is haunted by the idea of being imprisoned due to stepping out of line with her parents’ teachings. With the line in mind, is it possible the speaker feels trapped in how she wants to express her gender? This feeling of conformity that the last penis in ‘Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor’ conveys when, “He lies there weeping in terrible grief,/crying out Father, Father!” And as such, is the sex in parts three and four ways for the speaker to defy her parents through liberation? That while she had no active participation in how her parents employed her gender, now as an adult she does and fully embraces it.
 
Or it is possible the poem’s shallow exterior is all it has. Situation and humor. Simply gilded. Transphobia in the age when being transphobic was simply the norm. However, a poem does not necessarily make or break a collection—like a clay brick building, one or two can be faulty and the whole thing can still stand upright. Which in the case of The Gold Cell, both ‘Looking at My Father’ and ‘Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor’ are faulty bricks. Bricks that show the builder was imperfect; bricks that crumble with time, revealing the outdated politics of forty years ago; bricks that—as greathouse has shown—must be reformed and refired and rebuilt.
 
Final Rating: 3/5