Burn Center (poem)
"Burn Center" is a poem written by American poet Sharon Olds, and is a part of Olds's poetry collection "The Dead & The Living", published February 12, 1984, and has also been published in the October 1981 edition of Poetry. "The Dead & The Living" was chosen for the 1983 Lamont Poetry Selection and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The volume itself has sold over 50,000 copies and is known to be one of the best-selling contemporary works of poetry. Her works have been praised for their ability to show the "unpoetic" events that happen in life and turn them into emotional personal poetry. Topics of her poetry mainly cover family life with its struggles being the center focus and she also takes on political global events. For "Burn Center", the reader sees into Olds's fragile relationship with her mother, but she's been known to talk about the dysfunctional relationship between her and both of her parents. Themes of love and violence Olds reflects her family life in her poems. She talks about emotional, verbal, and physical abuse by both men and women. The men were typically more violent in a physical manner. Women imposed more of emotional