Alicia Ostriker Critical Essay | Critical Review by Diana Hume George

Critical Review by Diana Hume George

SOURCE: “Repairing the World,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. XVI, No. 3, December, 1998, pp. 10-11.

In the following review, George provides an overview of the principal themes of Ostriker's career within the context of the poetry in Stealing the Language and Writing Like a Woman and her two groundbreaking revisionist volumes on the Bible.

In a conversation many years ago about her own poetry and that of Anne Sexton and Alicia Ostriker, Maxine Kumin told me that she thought of all love poetry as elegiac. For three decades Alicia Suskin Ostriker has been writing an extended elegiac love poem, in the way of Emily Dickinson's letter to the world “that never wrote to me”. She asks for an answer that she does not expect, because that answer would take the form of global transformation. No matter if she knows humanity isn't yet up to the task of loving-kindness...
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