Green Age

by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Overview

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is that rare combination, a writer equally admired as poet and critic. The variety of subjects in Green Age is characteristic of her writing: from the opening poem, "Fifty," funny, courageous, and defiant, to a set of birthday poems for a grown daughter; from emulations of the Persian mystic Rumi, to the provactive "Meditation in Seven Days," whose central assumption is that we may find in the Bible traces of a Canaanite goddess whose worship was forbidden with the advent of patriarchal monotheism. But if her subjects may seem formidable, her poems are not. Ostriker is accessible, witty, daring, and humane, and she has become one of the most praised poets of her generation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822991748
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	02/20/2024
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
File size:	230 KB

About the Author

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is a major American poet and critic. She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including, most recently, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog; The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979–2011; and The Book of Seventy, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. She has received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award, among other honors. Ostriker teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Drew University and is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Editorial Reviews

In her rich seventh collection, poet and critic Ostriker ( The Imaginary Lover ; Vision and Verse in William Blake ) examines the complexities of human relationships with an intimate tone and a rhythmic sense of immediacy perhaps most evident in work discussing mothers and children. Observing a daughter's lonesome isolation, the speaker in ``A Birthday Suite'' notes that ``you knew you were / The final piece of fruit / Left in a festive bowl. . . . / A solitary apple, unripe, stunted / But keeping busy catalyzing the bitterness / Under its peel . . . .'' Ostriker's range, however, is broad and rewarding: she raises issues--sexual, religious--relevant both to contemporary and ancient women. Striking throughout is the poet's tendency to sympathize and nurture, affirming life despite its necessary pains: ``Friend, I could say / I've been alive a half a dozen moments / but that's not true / I've been alive my entire time / on this earth / I've been alive.'' (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Most of the poems in Ostriker's latest collection are love poems--for her family, the natural world, a medieval poet, and ``existence itself''; yet all celebrate without denying ``the sewage pipes'/ cold slime'' and other ugly, cruel, or discriminatory aspects of living. These are poems of quiet passion, lyric movement, and of thought. A fine poem sequence questions, ``If a woman is a Jew/ Of what is she the vessel''; other poems touch on poverty, class, motherhood, and aging, with its memories of earlier days and relationships. Like her criticism, Ostriker's poems are forceful, provocative, persuasive, and written for a wide audience on broad-ranging themes. Highly recommended.-- Cristanne Miller, Pomona Coll., Claremont, Cal.

Library Journal

Her spirit encompasses the exuberance of a girl, the vulnerability of someone in love, and wisdom of a mother who can allow her childern to leave home.”
—Choice


“Ostriker faces the tests that God and the world present and comes away with an affirmative vision; this is as unusual as it is welcome in these times, when poetry too often stops short of both.”
—Virginia Quarterly Review

From the Publisher