"Sex Without Love"

1. Olds, Sharon. "Sex Without Love." Thinking and Writing About Literature. 'Ed'. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St.Martin's, 2001. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sex-without-love/

2. In “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds, the speaker is trying to understand how any human could have sex with someone they’re not in love with. This poem was written in 1984, and I think that the genre is Love.

3. I like this poem because of the question the poet poses to the reader which, as I stated above, is how someone can sleep around and not feel love for the one they’re sleeping with. I also like how at the end of the poem, Olds states that the“…truth…” of why people sleep around, “…is the single body alone in the universe against its own best time.” (Olds 838) Olds begins the poem with flowery imagery about love, but quickly compares sex to “…wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away.” (Olds 838)

4. “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds has some similarities to “Qunicinera” by Judith Ortiz Cofer. One of the most obvious similarities I noticed about these two poems, was how they both represented something natural and expected, but are portrayed in a way that made it sound dirty and unnatural. In “Sex Without Love”, the speaker uses the words “red”, “steak”, and “wet” and compares these words to a newborn child. The imagery is grotesque because it makes the reader look at sex as if it were repulsive. The speaker in “Quncinera” does almost exactly the same thing, with words like, “nailed”, “poison”, “blood”, and “…skin stretched tight over my bones.” ( Cofer 284) Cofer uses going through adolescence seem painful and dreadful.