Alicia Ostriker has published sixteen volumes of poetry, including The Volcano and After; Waiting for the Light; The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog; The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011; No Heaven; The Volcano Sequence; and The Imaginary Lover, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. She was twice a National Book Award Finalist, for The Little Space (1998) and The Crack in Everything (1996), and twice a National Jewish Book Award winner. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Yale Review, Ontario Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies, and has been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic. Ostriker's critical work includes the now-classic Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women's Poetry in America, and other books on American poetry and on the Bible.

"Ostrik-er gives voice to where we are now in beau-ti-ful-ly direct and some-times terse free verse. ... Through the Shekhi-nah, frac-tured COVID time is re-under-stood as a series of spir-i-tu-al inter-stices: as chan-nels, caves, and door-ways where the divine can man-i-fest as a smil-ing presence. ... [Ostriker's] lyri-cal quest for light offers read-ers a stun-ning poet-ic roadmap with which they can find their way home to the con-tem-pla-tion of divin-i-ty -- at its most gen-er-ous and all-encompassing."
--Stephanie Bar-bé Hammer, Jewish Book Council

"Ostriker's subtle use of humor allows her to address the difficult emotions associated with aging and concomitant physical decline, while also pointing to larger concerns beyond the self, to the interconnectedness of racial violence, global catastrophes, and politics. At the same time, the speaker draws comfort from the world as it is, in all its complexity, inviting the reader to do the same"
--Leonora Simonovis, the Poetry Foundation's Harriet Books.

"At the start of Alicia Ostriker's tough, gorgeous collection "The Holy & Broken Bliss," she tells herself, "Write what you are afraid to write." And so, as the COVID pandemic spreads and the nation rages, Ostriker considers mortality close to home and across the land. So much COVID literature already feels as fresh as an old KN95 mask, but these poems gently tend a fever still burning in America."
--Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club

"Ostriker confronts the intricate dance between spiritual despair and revelatory beauty in her ethereal 17th collection. ... [The Holy & Broken Bliss] resonates long after the final page, reminding readers that even in a fractured, plague-stricken world, there is still a living, breathing force within all things."
--Publishers Weekly

Alicia Ostriker's stunning new poems bring into sharp focus the ills of body and earth, and the nexus between destruction and self-destruction, affirmation and ambivalence. I turn to them as to a moral compass and spiritual barometer for our troubled times, a guidebook on questing and questioning. Ostriker's prophetic and empathic voice extends that of Janus and the Shekhinah into the 21st century, its registers most singular and uncompromising in their caring."
--Mihaela Moscaliuc

"Alicia Ostriker's book The Holy & Broken Bliss arises from the enforced isolation of the COVID pandemic. The poems are poignant and frank in recounting the physical struggles and frailties of her and her husband's later years, and rightfully outraged by her awareness of the degenerate politics, climate catastrophe and racial injustice of our times. The results are poems of spiritual yearning for the divine presence that are also firmly grounded in this world. What ties it all together is how Ostriker remembers the call in Deuteronomy to 'choose life.' Her poems ache with wisdom because she has found a way to live with pain that poets know--'born as we are within the wound.' Read her for the solace, read her for the wisdom, read her for the realistic grace and the hard-earned balm."
--Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022

"'What am I to make of all this beauty/ and all this sorrow'--this question animates these indelible poems of a great old age that face, at times embrace, the implacable, with a language spare but unsparing in its awareness, straight from the educated heart. Written deep in the vein, these poems are Alicia Ostriker, one of our most essential poets, at the top of her form as she looks unflinchingly ahead to where the cave mouth stands open, the 'water rushing through blackness...'"
--Eleanor Wilner

"Grief begins when we know we love someone deeply. As for plagues and wars, we see these things from inside this world of deepest intimacy when that person is leaving us. The Holy & Broken Bliss feels like a psalm, as Ostriker does the one incredible dance between the anxieties preceding both death and what lies beyond. This is Ostriker at her deepest clarity and beauty."
--Afaa M. Weaver, author of A Fire in the Hills

Publisher: Alice James Books

Pub date: 2024-10-08

Length: 100 pages