The Crack In Everything (Pitt Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Alicia Suskin Ostriker (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ostriker has long been admired as both a feminist literary critic and a poet. The accomplished poems in her expansive eighth collection are grounded in the details of a woman's daily life and speak with the appeal of an intelligent, sympathetic friend. A broad-based politics enters this work routinely, like the morning news. Sensitive persona poems move the speaker into the realm of foreign wars, the bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia and the rape of a mentally retarded girl by her high-school classmates. Ostriker's poetics claim, as in "The Class," "To gather pain into language, to promise/ The critics are wrong, the other professors are wrong/ Who describe an art divisible from dirt,/ From rotten life." Yet these poems insist on life's essential goodness and passionate joy: "At the intersection of poverty and pestilence/ The planet's children, brave as hell, juiced/ Out of their gourds, invent the sacred dance." Within her generous vision of human imperfection, Ostriker confronts middle age and mortality with deft touch and wry humor, so that by the time we reach "The Mastectomy Poems"-whose observations cut as clean and sharp as the surgeon's scalpel-we are already immersed in her sensibility that "tragedy/ Is a sort of surrender."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

It is the fickle word that concerns Ostriker in this, her eighth book?but this time with the twist provided by hard new experience. "What the eye instantly consents to," as the problem is wittily framed, "Language stumbles after/ like some rejected/ Clumsy perpetual lover, Language/ Encouraging himself." Never mind that such recognition can claim the origin all poetizing?all species of writer's block as well?Ostriker is not afraid to call them as she sees. Many of these poems, especially those at the close of the book, convey the experience of mastectomy in a frank and liberating clarity but always with the riddle of an illness underneath. Even in the description of perfectly fine zinnias on a daughter's kitchen table, one can't help but get a sense of cancer's context: "their very cells break down, their membranes crushed/ Where the condemned/ Beg for forgetfulness/ Where the guards/ Revel in brutality." Recommended for poetry collections.?Steven R. Ellis, Pennsylvania State Univ. Libs., University Park
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (April 11, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822955938
• ISBN-13: 978-0822955931
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #442,345 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.