Most Popular Books by Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker seizes the opportunity to take us where too few poets have been able to take us: into a domain of what our fabulists like to call the "golden years." as we live longer, we become inevitably curious about the actual texture of these late years, curious about what happens in the soul. Out of that curiosity is a new kind of poetry born, an elderstile that has passion and irony, wisdom, folly, clarity and tenderness. In her keen engagement with the self and the world, Ostriker offers us a voice and a perspective that explore the territory of seventy and beyond.

Essays on women poets and on the relationship between gender and creativity

From A Woman Under the Surface:MOON AND EARTH Alicia Ostriker ? Of one substance, of oneMatter, they have cruellyBroken apart. They never will touch Each other again. The shiningLovelier and youngerTurns away, a pitiful girl. She is completely nakedAnd it hurts. The largerMotherly one, breathlessly luminous Emerald, and blue, and whiteTraveling mists, suffersBirth and death, birth and death, and the shockOf internal heat killed by external cold.They are dancing through that blackness. They press as ifTo come closer.

Like much twentieth-century feminist writing today, this book crosses the boundaries of genre. Biblical interpretation combines with fantasy, autobiography, and poetry. Politics joins with eroticism. Irreverence coexists with a yearning for the sacred. Scholarship contends with heresy. Most excitingly, the author continues and extends the tradition of arguing with God that commences in the Bible itself and continues now, as it has for centuries, to animate Jewish writing. The difference here is that the voice that debates with God is a woman''s. In her introduction, "Entering the Tents, " Ostriker defines the need to struggle against a tradition in which women have been silenced and disempowered - and to recover the female power buried beneath the surface of the biblical texts. In "The Garden, " she reinterprets the mythically complex stories of Creation. Then she considers the stories of "The Fathers, " from Abraham and Isaac to Moses, David, and Solomon - and their wives, mothers, and sisters. In "The Return of the Mothers, " she begins with a radical new interpretation of the book of Esther, includes a meditation on the silenced wife of Job and the idea of justice, and concludes with a fable on the death of God and a prayer to the Shekhinah, the feminine aspect of God. Ostriker refuses to dismiss the Bible as meaningless to women. Instead, in this angry, eloquent, visionary book, she attempts to recover what is genuinely sacred in these sacred texts.

In this selection of poems from thirty years of a distinguished writing career, we see the growth of a poet’s mind, heart, and spirit as Ostriker struggles to love “this wounded / World that we cannot heal, that is our bride.” Whether she probes the meaning of childhood, family, marriage, and motherhood, or art, history, politics, and God; whether she is celebrating sexuality or confronting mortality, the poet includes “whatever I can grasp of human experience within my art—the good and beautiful, the evil and chaotic. I tell my students that they must write what they are afraid to write; and I attempt to do so myself.”

A collection of poems explores Jewish history, liturgy, theology, and the author''s relationship with Judaism and spirituality.

For the Love of God is a provocative and inspiring reinterpretation of six essential Biblical texts. Attempting to understand "some of the wildest, strangest, most splendid writing in Western tradition," Alicia Suskin Ostriker shows how the Bible embraces sexuality and skepticism, boundary crossing and challenges to authority, how it illuminates the human psyche and mirrors our own violent times, and how it asks us to make difficult choices in the quest for justice.

Essays that explore the meaning of politics, love, and spiritual life in American poetry from Whitman to the present

"Nationally acclaimed and multi-award-winning poet, Ostriker, brings The Holy & Broken Bliss to light after the pandemic--these keenly observant and urgent poems feel grounded in daily life, the rituals of living, and their tendernesses. Despite our deep flaws and imperfections, there can still be cause for joy, and there is always a reason for celebration. Poems find strength in marriage, appreciating an unbreakable bond in the middle of the world breaking down. Often, the spare lines of these poems enhance their feeling of inevitability, deepening the speakers'' contemplations of death, writing in the face of death-not only from within the pandemic but by many plagues we are afflicted with. The poems ask us to consider what living looks like inside of ongoing misery (misery we often are responsible for making and accepting). They call us to ask ourselves how we make our lives meaningful, ourselves worthy when despair is ever-present. The Holy & Broken Bliss contemplates free will, autonomy, self-control, the commodification of ourselves, and our desires for vengeance, to be sated by anger, to be angry, and to weigh our collective sicknesses"--

Poems contrast the experience of birth and motherhood with the violence and tragedy of war