The Victims

"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden (1966)

Published roughly 20 years before “The Victims,” Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” is an important, canonical text that illustrates and examines a father-child family dynamic. Told in the past tense—from the point of view of an adult looking back on their childhood and having an epiphany about their childhood—the poem follows a similar framework to “The Victims,” in which Olds’s speaker, looking back on the past, comes to a newfound realization as an adult in the present. Additionally, as a comparison, “Those Winter Sundays” has to do with a very different theme (fatherly love) from “The Victims,” which makes this poem an interesting side-by-side comparison.

"Tours" by C.D. Wright (1982)

Published just two years before “The Victims,” C.D. Wright’s “Tours” is a poem about a child witnessing her parent’s abusive relationship. While the poem is told in the present tense (rather than told in the past tense in the form of a memory), the context of the poem (the abuse the child witnesses) and the way the child handles this abuse might serve as important discussion points for understanding the psychology of childhood trauma and the way this trauma is represented in contemporary poetry.