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In this major study, Alicia Suskin Ostriker probes the origins and meanings of contemporary women's poetry since the 1960's. Proposing that women writers must be "thieves of language," Ostriker traces the struggle of women poets today to achieve self-definition in the context of literary tradition designed to repress the female voice. Stealing the Language examines this new poetry in relation to its female roots and as a powerful alternative to academic modernism and postmodernism, loking at the poetics of the body, of anger and violence, of "the imperative of intimacy," and of revisionist mythmaking in women's poetry. |
| "Alicia Ostriker's ambitious, lively, and luminous Stealing the Language
will appeal to anyone interested in women's lives and letters as well as
to anyone who wants to understand the history of American poetry.
--Sandra M. Gilbert
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| This year the most important contribution to contemporary poetry may
be a book of criticism: Alicia Suskin Ostriker's Stealing the Language.
--Yvonne, MS.
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| "Don't think Alicia Ostriker's new book is some standard secondary
source, safely distanced and oblique. It will climb right into your dreams."
--Christina Robb, Boston Globe
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| Anyone who wants a refresher course in women's poetry in America should
head immediately for Alicia Ostriker's comprehensive appraisal....Not only
is it based on broad scholarship but it's also written with passionate
involvement and recommended even for those who feel they are familiar with
the spectrum of female talent from feminist to formalist, straight to gay,
white to Black. Ostriker manages to pull it all together in this book about
the emergence of women's poetry in America.
--Lois Ungar, Contact/II
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| Alicia Ostriker's Stealing the Language is literary history as it should
be written--based on an extraordinary range of reading, written with passionate
involvement, grounded in acute readings of particular poems and filled
with provocative general statements.
--James E.B. Breslin
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| Ostriker combines the range of a scholar, the clear expository powers
of a critic, and the passion of a feminist and a poet. She puts the poems
in their historical and political context, teaches us their body language,
demystifies their myths, and shows us how they challenge our habits of
reading. But the point of stealing the Language is not only to provide
a map of recent poetry by women. It is also to persuade us that this poetry
can change our lives.
--Laurence Lipking
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Table
of Contents
*****
To Order:
Beacon Press
******
Selection:
top
paragraph on p 7, top paragraph on p 8