[In the following excerpt, Townsend highlights thematic concerns of The Crack in Everything.]

In “The Class,” in Alicia Suskin Ostriker's eighth collection, The Crack in Everything, the speaker/teacher says her job is to give her students “permission / to gather pain into language,” to make an art that is not “divisible from dirt, / from rotten life,” because, she believes, “Against evidence … / Poetry heals or redeems suffering,” even if it is “not the poet who is healed, / But someone else, years later.” Ostriker examines subjects as diverse as “weightless / unstoppable neutrinos / leaving their silvery trace / in vacuum chambers,” a Times Square bag lady in her “cape of rusty razor blades,” three million dead “stacked … like sticks” in winter, or the “nectar / in the bottom of a cup / This blissfulness in which I strip and dive.” This world is seen against the undercurrent of mortality that pulses beneath even the most optimistic poems.

Ostriker writes from a level of awareness that is both heartbreaking and healing, precisely because it encompasses so much loss. She searches for what, in the title of one poem, she calls “The Vocabulary of Joy,” noting how very difficult indeed it is to “define … happiness, / Though surely you know what I mean / In the late twentieth century // when I say this.”

The book moves from examinations of contemporary events to meditations on art and artists, to musings about the meaning of existence, to the closing, more immediately personal poems on age, illness and healing. Part of Ostriker's search is the search for self in mid-life. “Don't I know you from somewhere?” the speaker asks in “Neoplatonic Riff.”“Didn't I use to be you?” “Looking like a grownup, but still / Crayoning in the outlines, a good child, / A good committee member,” she finds herself in her fifties, still trying to figure out who she is.

One of Ostriker's greatest strengths as poet has always been the lack of separation between self and world in her work. Immediate, passionate and direct, even the more public poems in this collection possess an intimacy that startles the reader. Capable of personifying subjects as diverse as a California surfer, a migrant, even a “globule” of transparent life, Ostriker also testifies to the horrors of our time. In poems like “The Russian Army Goes Into Baku” and “The Eighth and the Thirteenth” she looks at cruelty and violence with a fierce and unblinking eye.

In the splendid extended sequence “The Book of Life,” she reflects on the strength of spirituality and the friendships of female creators. “To whom shall we say / Inscribe me in the book of life,” she asks—

To whom if not each other
To whom if not our damaged children
To whom if not our piteous ancestors
To whom if not the lovely ugly forms
We have created,
The forms we wish to coax
From the clay of nonexistence—
However persistent the voice
That rasps hopeless, that claims
Your fault, your fault—
As if outside the synagogue we stood
On holier ground in a perennial garden
Jews like ourselves have just begun to plant.

(p. 45)

Here, in one seamless stanza, the speaker embraces self, family, friends, creative work and spirituality, making what must die away into life.

Like [poet Lucille] Clifton, Ostriker describes the experience of mastectomy, writing a path though the “riddle” of illness with clarity and grace. “You think it will never happen to you,” she begins, whirling us into diagnosis, surgery and recovery with the peculiar intimacy of the second person. There is shock here. The post-op scar is a “skinny stripe / That won't come off with soap / A scarlet letter lacking a meaning … / It's nothing.” There is grief: “Was I succulent? Was I juicy? / you sliced me like a green honeydew.” There is rage. The poet is careful never to say “the thing that is forbidden to say,” never invites her colleagues “to view it pickled in a Mason jar.” There is healing: “Like one of those trees with a major limb lopped / I'm a shade more sublime today than yesterday.” And finally, in the delightfully understated “Epilogue: Nevertheless,” there is recovery. “It actually takes me a while,” she says, “To realize what they have in mind” when friends ask how she is feeling. Book-bag on her back, she is out the door, to whatever comes next. These strong, tough-minded, lyrical poems take us there too. …

Ostriker, though often tender, is overall witty and urbane, a poet of intellect whose voice is filtered through an actual social consciousness.