| Alicia Ostriker has pondered the elusive meaning of sexuality, the
looming catastrophes of marriage, the ongoing atavistic bloodshed of history.
In all of her books she has held sons, daughters and husband, sanity and
justice, beauty and God, in a precarious balance between disenchantment
and epiphany.
--Harold Schweizer, Literature and Medicine
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| By far the most breathtaking poem in the entire collection is "The
Eighth and Thirteenth"....If Adorno said one shouldn't write poetry after
the holocaust, then this poem proves that a poet of Ostriker's strengths
can and should write poems about the Holocaust. Ostriker, caught by happenstance
listening to Shostokovich's Eighth "on public radio," has written a poem
that avalanches down the page.....a collage of voices in place of the silenced.
--Sharon Dolin, American Book Review
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| The Crack in Everything: Is it a shift in the earth's tectonic plates,
the purposeful Zen flaw in a ceramic vase that individualizes its perfection,
the long pink keoid ridge on a newly flat chest? All of the above.... [The
book] reaffirms the poet's unique and contradictory role, at once storyteller
and witness, s/he who makes of language not a prison but a prism, refracting
and re-combining the spectum of human possibilities.
--Marilyn Hacker, The Nation
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| Ostriker writes from a level of awareness that is both heartbreaking
and healing, precisely because it encompasses so much loss....One of Ostriker's
greatest strengths as poet has always been the lack of separation between
self and world in her work. Immediate, passionate and direct, even the
more public poems in this collection possess an intimacy that startles
the reader...In poems like "The Russian Army Goes into Baku" and "The Eighth
and Thirteenth" she looks at cruelty and violence with a fierce and unblinking
eye.
--Alison Townsend, Women's Review of Books
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| The Crack in Everything contains a marvelous interpretation of the
origins of poet May Swenson's particularity and curiosity, and an homage
to painter Alice Neel which uses words the way Neel used flesh and colors....What
is most impressive about this volume is the poet's range, not only of subject
matter but tone. Ostriker is as comfortable writing about Babi Yar (if
comfortable could be the word!) as she is cracking Jewish jokes....She
also creates unforgettable similes and metaphors....Ostriker deserves a
wider reputation as one of our finest poets.
--Robert Phillips, Hudson Review |
