The Space Heater

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares the poem “The Space Heater,” by Sharon Olds. Olds is a preeminent American poet celebrated for her visceral and "confessional" style.

Born in San Francisco in 1942 and raised in a strict "hellfire Calvinist" household, she later earned a PhD from Columbia University before publishing her breakthrough debut, Satan Says, in 1980. Over a prolific career, Olds has received nearly every major literary honor, including the Pulitzer Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize as well as the Frost Medal and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. This poem is about a moment in her psychoanalysis.

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 28 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is an instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.