SOURCE: A review of The Crack in Everything, in Poetry, Vol. CLXX, No. 3, June, 1997, pp. 174-77.

In the following review, Taylor considers the significance of and justification for widely mixed themes in The Crack in Everything.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker's new collection [The Crack in Everything] may at first surprise the reader with its multifarious subject matter (the “everything” referred to in the title), but this impression of heterogeneity takes on a compelling significance and justification by “The Mastectomy Poems,” the fourth and last section. Here the disparate “cracks” that have been observed in others and in various societal phenomena fissure all the way back to the empathic observer, that is, brutally converge on the poet herself. “You never think it will happen to you,” she avows in the first of twelve candid poems, “Then as you sit paging a magazine … / Waiting to be routinely waved good-bye / … the mammogram...