In the mid 1990s, Alicia Ostriker was diagnosed with breast cancer. She expressed her feelings about this traumatic experience, which resulted in a mastectomy and a long, painful recovery, in her collection of poems, The Crack in Everything. When it was published in 1996, the book confirmed her reputation as one of America’s finest poets. The fourth section of the collection, titled “The Mastectomy Poems,” deals directly with her response to each stage of her cancer: the diagnosis, the surgery and treatment, and the aftermath. In one of the most powerful poems of this sequence, “Mastectomy,” the speaker describes her interaction with the doctor who performed the surgery and imagines how he removed her breast. The poem becomes a poignant exploration of one woman’s struggle to understand and cope with the physical and emotional consequences of this disease.