Volcano and After

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.

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.’