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much needed
An unflinching look at the human and spiritual questions we face in this decade.Ostriker tells the truth as it resontates thought myth and memory.

Teach us to read, teach us to think, teach us to love
In "The Book of Seventy," Ostriker's twelfth book of poetry, she returns to some of the themes of her earlier poetry as well as themes that have shaped her prose, but in "The Book of Seventy" her language, her thinking, her images are more distilled, more urgent. That is what makes this a necessary book. Whether writing about mortality, the closely observed quotidian, or reconsidering the voices of Kali, Persephone, and Gaia, Ostriker renders poems in this collection that are breath-taking in their exactitude and density. This is a collection of a commanding poet demonstrating the excellence of her craft and her intuition.

Praise for The Book of Seventy
I own this book and loved reading it....it's tender and tough and honest about the later years(which I'm in too). And the news it carries about life, about our lives, is vital for all ages. ... Read more

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This is a collection of poems by Alicia Suskin Ostriker. ... Read more

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A gorgeous exhalation
With eager breath, Ostriker's collection of poetry comes to life with much to convey. These sensuous poems weave a breath-taking tapestry about the feminine and the holy surrounding us in our lives, often hidden but just beneath the surface. Her knowledge of the Old Testament is clear here, and it more than enhances these poems. It gives them an added grace and strength. These poems are almost like a discussion with holy aspects of the universe, grappling toward a glorious knowing. The energy and imagery brought to mind Anita Diamant's "The Red Tent" and other feminist works, and "The Volcano Sequence" inspires just as strongly.

An original, visionary new book
This is an extraordinary new book from one of America's best poets, full of powerful imagination, formal inventiveness, tireless curiosity, and profound challenges to the spirit and social arrangements of our time. Extending traditions of modernist and postmodernist long poems, The Volcano Sequence is a 119-page poem in 9 major sections plus a coda, written in a variety of poetic styles and voices ranging from lyrical meditations to provocative interrogations--of the gods, the universe, our politicians and philosophers, and our literary traditions. One of Alicia Ostriker's great strengths is her ability to write poetry that is simultaneously accessible, intellectually ocean-deep, and filled with a page-turning emotional grip. The Volcano Sequence's poetic explorations interweave an array of spiritual, psychological, and social themes. In one of the central images of the book, Ostriker takes on the role of a feminist midwife trying to use her imaginative powers to re-birth female energies that have historically been devoured by patriarchal conventions. Like lava in a volcano, long-repressed liberating energies can eventually find a way to get out and reshape our world--"sometimes the stories take you and fling you against a wall / sometimes you go right through the wall"(119). Almost every page of this new book is filled with memorable lines, the kind of poetry that makes your spine sit up and take notice, that makes you see the world from new, amazing angles.

Written with a truly literate and skilled economy of words
The poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker is complex, original, and written with a truly literate and skilled economy of words. The Volcano Sequence is a compilation of verse that fully showcases Ostriker a master poet in the full vigor of her imagination and wordsmithing talent. Learn To Recognize The Gestures: when her hands cup her breasts/she enjoys her sweet strength/sap ascends the oak//dancing she causes/the young to dance/and to kiss//she may carry a weapon/a knife a gun a razor/she may wear a belt of skulls//when she discharges her anger in laughter/white lightning illuminates the horizon/from pole to pole//often she lays her hand over her eyes/like a secretary leaving/an office building at evening//cradling that infant boy/sitting him on her lap/smoothing the folds of her dress: this means pity//arms crossed: this signifies judgment. ... Read more

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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."Amazon.com Review
"Like one of those trees with a major limb lopped, / I'm ashade more sublime today than yesterday," Alicia Ostriker writes in"Normal," one of several fine mastectomy poems collected in TheLittle Space. A poet of consummate physicality, Ostriker wraps herphilosophical inquiries in the fleshly guise of poems about marriage,illness, and above all motherhood--that "continuous egg through time,"as she calls it. In "Surviving," for instance, Ostriker mournsexpressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died at the heightof her artistic powers, shortly after giving birth. FromModersohn-Becker, she moves to her own mother's oft-repeateddisappointments, and then to a single, shattering truth: "What womandoesn't die in childbirth / What child doesn't murder the mother."

What is our responsibility to these thwarted women, these "brokenmothers," our forebears? Don't we owe them more than just grief? ForOstriker, the answer lies in poetry itself. Faced with suffering oratrocity ("The Boys, the Broomhandle, the Retarded Girl"), sheconcentrates on making us see. "Art destroys silence," she imaginesShostakovich writing in "The Eighth and Thirteenth," then hears "thewords never again / Clashing against the words / Again andagain / --That music." Therein lies Ostriker's mission: to depictevil and at the same time speak against it. Like the speaker of"Normal," these wry, clear-eyed poems are cheerful in the face ofaffliction, unflinching in their need to bear witness.--ChloeByrne ... Read more

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Essays on women poets and on the relationship between gender and creativity
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Ostriker Opened My Eyes
A wonderful book of literary criticism discussing the works of HD, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and May Swenson. I was initially leery because the book was first published in the early 80s. However, Ostriker's ideas are still fresh, interesting and thought provoking. She almost has me agreeing with her that HD is the greatest woman poet of the 20th century.... almost. The title might be misleading for some. This is not a how-to manual for aspiring writers. This is a wonderful book of essays that sent me straight out to re-read poets whose work I hadn't read in years. Additionally, Ostriker's comments about her own creativity process have lead me to read some of her work as well. I was not disappointed. This book is a must read for anyone interested in 20th Century poetry.

Fascinating! A must-have guide for any aspiring author!
Alicia Ostriker's marvelous guide to writing is not only unique in it's format and style, but is simply a wonderful guide for how to capture theessence of the increasingly popular women's writing movement.Oprah's bookclub has really increased interest in women's writing, with authors such asJane Hamilton, Janet Fitch, and Ursula Hegi, to mention just a few. Doubtless, many aspiring writers have wanted to capture that same magicthat makes those books so appealing--and this book is the first step! It iscompulsively readable, immensely encouraging, and ultimately, a supreme,unparalleled guide to becoming a better, more readable writer.The onlything that prevents this book from receiving Amazon's highest rating isthat there could have been more exercises and there still seemed enoughinformation left out to warrant another book or perhaps a series. Nonetheless, this is an extremely enlightening guide and well worth itspurchase price. Bravo! ... Read more

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A meditation on the key narratives of the Hebrew Bible, this book includes characters of the Old Testament, and is viewed by the author from a feminist perspective. ... Read more

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A Groundbreaking New Reading of Torah
Ostriker brings all the passion and clarity of her poet's vision to a remarkably informed reading of the major stories of Torah (the Jewish Bible). Never narrow or parochial, she cracks open the texts and lets theimages beneath the frozen layers of conventional interpretation flow wildlyand beautifully. She speaks hard truths in a spirit of compassion and love.If you have any interest in what keeps Judaism alive, read this book! ... Read more

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Alicia Suskin Ostriker's voice has long been acknowledged as a major force in American poetry. In No Heaven, her eleventh collection, she takes a hint from John Lennon's "Imagine" to wrestle with the world as it is: "no hell below us, / above us only sky."

It is a world of cities, including New York, London, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where the poet can celebrate pickup basketball, peace marches, and the energy of graffiti. It is also a world of families, generations coming and going, of love, love affairs, and friendship. Then it is a world full of art and music, of Rembrandt and Bonnard, Mozart and Brahms. Finally, it is a world haunted by violence and war. No Heaven rises to a climax with elegies for Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli zealot, and for the poet's mother, whose death is experienced in the context of a post-9/11 impulse to destroy that seems to seduce whole nations.

Yet Ostriker's ultimate stance is to "Try to praise the mutilated world," as the poet Adam Zagajewski has counseled. At times lyric, at times satiric, Ostriker steadfastly pursues in No Heaven her poetics of ardor, a passion for the here and now that has chastened and consoled her many devoted readers. ... Read more

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Poetry in the Moment and After
(Alicia Ostriker read at the West Side YMCA on Friday, February 2, 2007 as part of the Writer's Voice Visiting Authors Series.This is from my introduction to the event).

Reading Alicia Suskin Ostriker's poems in No Heaven is like having someone who needs to impart something essential to you leaning in, quietly and yet with great intensity, showing you something of utmost importance, never lecturing, never condescending, the unearthing of vital information seeming to occur in the moment of telling, so when, the payoffs in the poems themselves take place, in the burst of the revealed moment, the impact is intense and profound.

The ease of the language, its casualness and conversationality might make one overlook to care with which the language here is wrought.

Alicia shows relationships as clearly the commingling of two distinct entities; whether we completely understand the person we're with or not, these poem's simple conversations mirror the familiarity of those long together, whether lover, family member or dear friend.There's that easy connection, yet always so fragile, knowing that we must make ready to part from all we love and hold dear, and yet how we must always stay in the moment, so that what we have will not become subsumed by what we have lost, or will lose. She writes, in the poem "Mid-February":

"Friend, it's a day for a walk
are we going to walk it?"

...and that becomes the challenge of these poems, to have us not waste the day, not take for granted that the beauty and pain and joy and sorrow will continue ever on.

Another Achievement from an Essential American Poet
Alicia Ostriker is a quintessential American poet in the tradition of Walt Whitman and Muriel Rukeyser.NO HEAVEN is the follow-up to Ostriker's brilliant VOLCANO SEQUENCE (lamentably left off the Pulitzer, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award lists)--and here once again we find Ostriker writing poems about real people, crucial human experience and the spiritual essence that runs through everything.NO HEAVEN is a brilliant collection that is hard hitting ("Liking It," "Tearing the Poem Up and Eating It," "Elegy before the War,"), tender ("Brooklyn Twilight," "In the Forty-Fifth Year of Marriage"), and humorous ("When we leap, we hang in the air like Nijinsky taking a nap" from "Pickup," ". . .when/that brilliant Jew poet took/The train for the next world/American nirvana/Temporarily went with him" from "Elegy for Allen.")NO HEAVEN contains crucial poems for our misguided times from one of America's (or should I say the world's?) best, bravest, and most eloquent poets.

Everything Poetry Should Be
No Heaven is a terrific book-- just what poetry should be: at once moving, because it touches old and deep knowledge, and new because it opens heart and mind again.Death is always present as real, heightening consciousness.Every poem contains "a piercing glance into the life of things," as Marianne Moore said, a unity of soul and form. Ostriker reveals the horror and sacredness of everyday life by constantly reinventing the words believed to be ordinary, here transformed.Buy this beautiful collection and find yourself in no heaven but on incandescent eternal ephemeral earth -- the place to be human. ... Read more

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This volume of essays celebrates poetry that aims to change the world, whether through engagement with political issues, reimagining the meanings of love, recasting our relationship with nature; or through new relationships with our spiritual traditions. Alicia Ostriker's opening essay, defining the difference between poetry and propaganda, surveys the artistic accomplishments of the women's poetry movement. Succeeding essays explore the meaning of politics, love, and the spiritual life in the work of Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon Olds, Maxine Kumin, Lucille Clifton, and Allen Ginsberg.
In her work, Ostriker can be controversial, as when she attacks the academic establishment for rejecting the erotic dimension of poetry, or when she meditates on the significance of the black poet Lucille Clifton to herself as a reader, or when she argues that Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"--famous as the primary poem of the Beat Generation--is also a profoundly Jewish poem. Yet her writing is always lively and readable, free of academic jargon, inviting the reader to enjoy a wide range of poetic styles and experiences.
Ostriker's criticism, like her poetry, is both feminist and deeply humane. These essays on American poetry will appeal to students of poetry, scholars of American literature, and anyone who enjoys the work of the poets discussed in the book.
Alicia Ostriker is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Imaginary Lover, which won the William Carlos Williams Award and The Crack in Everything, which was a National Book award finalist in 1996, and which received the Paterson Prize in 1997 and the San Fransisco State Poetry Center Award in 1998. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
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Quoting King Solomon's famous prayer to God at the Temple in Jerusalem, "Behold, the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded," Alicia Suskin Ostriker posits a God who cannot be contained by dogma and doctrine. Troubled by the way the Bible has become identified in our culture with a monolithic authoritarianism, Ostriker focuses instead on the extraordinary variability of Biblical writing.

For the Love of God is a provocative and inspiring re-interpretation of six essential Biblical texts: The Song of Songs, the Book of Ruth, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Jonah, and Job. In prose that is personal and probing, analytically acute and compellingly readable, Ostriker sees these writings as "counter-texts," deviating from convention yet deepening and enriching the Bible, our images of God, and our own potential spiritual lives. Attempting to understand "some of the wildest, strangest, most splendid writing in Western tradition," she 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.

For better or worse, our society is wedded to the Bible. But according to Talmud, "There is always another interpretation." Ostriker demonstrates that the Bible, unlike its reputation, offers a plenitude of surprises. ... Read more

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The Bible as an open book
I enjoyed Ostriker's book and was challenged by it. I'd recommend it for anyone with an open mind whose faith is strong. On the other hand those who think the Bible is either dull or overly violent might find a new and interesting perspective here. And those who find themselves on the margin of common church theology may well find it refreshing. As a result of reading it I've taken up Ecclesiastes for my devotional reading. ... Read more

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The five books of the Hebrew Bible known--collectively as the Five Scrolls--are among the most universally revered books of the Old Testament and are considered "wells of living water" from which flow the intense spirituality of deep Jewish piety.  

Here, published together for the first time in a trade edition and ordered according to their use in services during the year, are Canticle of Canticles, The Book of Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and The Book of Esther. Each book presents a message of hope and trust in God in spite of the cruelties of chance and the barbarity of enemies.  With a preface by National Book Award-nominated poet Alicia Suskin Ostiker, The Five Scrolls shows us how love has power over death, how the light of Providence shines even in the dark, that to see clearly is to fear God, and that Existence is both miracle and sacrifice. ... Read more

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What happens when women writers re-imagine culture? How do feminists need that ur-text of patriarchy, the Bible? Unwritten volume: Re-thinking teh Bible attempts to re-think certain customary assumptions about feminism and about the Bible, in the light of poetic "readings" of biblical texts by 19th and 20th century women writers. The author proposes that women writers relate to the Bible in complex ways, which both critique biblical misogyny and stem directly from elements of transgressive writing within scripture iteself. Ultimately Ostriker suggests that feminist reinterpretations of scripture are the inevitable consequence of spiritual values which ask us to turn from institutions to the meaning of the original revelation. ... Read more