Alicia Ostriker 1937-

(Full name Alicia Suskin Ostriker) American poet, critic, and editor.

The following entry provides an overview of Ostriker's career through 1998.

An accomplished poet and literary critic, Ostriker has combined her passion for both poetry and criticism to create a body of work that primarily focuses on women's issues in American society, yet also embraces a universal feminism. Influenced by the visionary poetics of early nineteenth-century British poet and artist William Blake, much of Ostriker's poetry concerns the personal, domestic, and professional roles of women in the contemporary world and the ways these roles influence women's notions of self-identity. With frankness, clarity, and ethical insight equal to that evinced in her poetry, Ostriker has examined the relationship between gender and literature in her criticism, especially in the controversial study Stealing the Language (1986). Critics of Ostriker's writings generally have focused on her literary scholarship rather than her poetry.

Biographical Information

Born in 1937 in Brooklyn, New York, Ostriker was raised in a Manhattan housing project by her college-educated parents, David and Beatrice Suskin. Her mother often read Shakespeare and Browning to Ostriker as a girl, which prompted her to begin writing her own poetry. Ostriker's first ambition, however, was to become an artist, and as an adolescent she showed an affinity for producing sketches and for studying art. In 1958 she married Jeremiah Ostriker, and one year later earned a bachelor's degree in English from Brandeis University. Ostriker pursued graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, which granted her a Ph.D. in 1964, a year after the birth of her first child. Her dissertation on William Blake eventually became her first published work, Vision and Verse in William Blake (1965); she also edited a volume of his complete poetry in 1977. In 1965 Ostriker joined the English faculty at Rutgers University, where she has held a professorship since 1972. In 1969 she published her first book of poems, Songs, most of which she had written as a student. Ostriker worked to refine her poetic voice in subsequent volumes entitled Once More Out of Darkness (1971) and A Dream of Springtime (1979). By the early 1980s she had mastered her art form, producing The Mother/Child Papers (1980) and A Woman Under the Surface (1982). In 1983 she published her first book-length piece of feminist literary criticism, Writing Like a Woman. In 1986 Stealing the Language appeared, along with another poetry collection, The Imaginary Lover, which won the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America. After the publication of Green Age (1989), Ostriker turned her attention toward her Jewish heritage and biblical scholarship by exploring the traditions of Judaism in the context of feminism in Feminist Revision and the Bible (1992) and The Nakedness of the Fathers (1994). Following her experiences with breast cancer in the mid-1990s, Ostriker published two more volumes of poetry: The Crack in Everything (1996), which includes a poetry sequence titled “The Mastectomy Poems”; and a collection of selected poems from throughout her career, titled The Little Space (1998).

Major Works

Ostriker's first book of poems, Songs, assumes a rather conventional voice but exhibits formal versatility and socially conscientious themes. In the free-verse poetry of Once More Out of Darkness and A Dream of Springtime Ostriker's own voice becomes more evident. Such autobiographical themes as pregnancy, childbirth, and the poet's childhood, family relationships, and professional experiences dominate both collections, although the latter also addresses politics and history. In the experimental poems of The Mother/Child Papers the circumstances of Ostriker's life are set against events of the Vietnam War era. Divided into...