Overview

Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s passionate voice has long been acknowledged as a vital force in American poetry. From urgent spiritual quest to biting political satire, from elegy to comedy, from celebration of the city street and the world “as a paradise might be / if we had eyes to see,” to the “crack in earth . . . crack in her mind,” from brilliant evocations of art and music to mother-daughter wrestlings, Ostriker’s poetry rings with insistence on beauty and truth. Drawing from six of her previous books, and highlighting a sequence of bold new poems exploring the challenges and absurdities of aging, The Volcano and After is a masterpiece for our time.

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9780822967460

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Alicia Ostriker continues to grapple with and celebrate the life of a woman--wife, mother, lover, friend, teacher, and citizen of the world. Because of her age, as well as the precariousness of our times, Ostriker seems to speak even more forcefully, as if a confrontation with ultimate loss has engendered a vibrant flowering. Her devotion to the physical world--to what gives beauty and value to our lives, to pleasure--for example, her candid and brilliant explorations of sex in old age. At 80, she proclaims, she hasn't had her last sex--has always made her the rarest gift to readers who, like me, rely on poetry for example. And we have so few examples at this age! Elder stateswoman Ostriker forges ahead, more audacious and sure-footed than ever, invigorated by her task to take us with her all the way.--Toi Derricotte In a voice absolutely her own--wild, earthy, irreverent, full of humor and surprise--Ostriker takes on nothing less than what it feels like to be alive.--Joan Larkin These capacious poems are smart, passionate, witty, acutely observant, heart-stabbing. They contain multitudes, embracing both 'hot beauty' and 'thick and magnificent rage, ' 'the impulse to destroy' and 'the body...keen for pleasure again, ' along with a bounty of other precise nuances of thought and perception. Alicia Ostriker binds together the contradictions of our contemporary lives in an insistent music that does what all real poetry does--'it becomes true.'--Ellen Bass

Author Information

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is a major American poet and critic. She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including, most recently, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog; The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979-2011; and The Book of Seventy, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. She has received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award, among other honors. Ostriker teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Drew University and is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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