[In the following review, Taylor considers the significance of and justification for widely mixed themes in The Crack in Everything.]

Alicia Suskin Ostriker's new collection [The Crack in Everything] may at first surprise the reader with its multifarious subject matter (the “everything” referred to in the title), but this impression of heterogeneity takes on a compelling significance and justification by “The Mastectomy Poems,” the fourth and last section. Here the disparate “cracks” that have been observed in others and in various societal phenomena fissure all the way back to the empathic observer, that is, brutally converge on the poet herself. “You never think it will happen to you,” she avows in the first of twelve candid poems, “Then as you sit paging a magazine … / Waiting to be routinely waved good-bye / … the mammogram technician / Says Sorry, we need to do this again.” Ostriker describes her operation (a powerful poem is addressed to her doctor), meditates on “What Was Lost,” before investigating her feelings as she recovers. During her convalescence, for instance, she breaks off an icicle, declaring it to be “A brandished javelin / Made of sheer / Stolen light / To which the palm sticks / As the shock of cold / Instantly shoots through the arm / To the heart— / I need a language like that.”

Ostriker indeed seeks a language capable of taking on “the extremes” (as she puts in “Marie at Tea”), which is to say that she strives to perceive the malefic, debilitating, or cancerous fractures beneath the smooth, deceiving surfaces of reality. This pursuit is admittedly arduous. “What the eye instantly consents to,” she specifies in “Still Life: A Glassful of Zinnias on my Daughter's Kitchen Table,” “Language stumbles after / Like some rejected / Clumsy perpetual lover … / Encouraging himself: maybe this time / She'll go with me.” Yet struggling with language is not the only difficulty. It is remarkable how often Ostriker mediates reality through the creativity of others. Poems here concern, allude to, or invoke Wittgenstein, Rothko, van Gogh, May Swenson, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Shostakovich, Plato, Chekhov, Rumi, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, et al. Is their presence perhaps sometimes more self-hindering than enlightening? Even the last Mastectomy Poem concludes with Ostriker running off with a “bookbag on [her] back.” Several engagé poems—memorably, those set in Somalia or at a rape trial where the victim is a retarded girl—likewise seem reactions, however justifiably indignant, not to what Ostriker has eye-witnessed (or experienced in her own body) but rather to what she has learned through the news media.

This is not to suggest that Ostriker's bookbag is overly burdensome; only that the problem of “paying attention”—not just to extraordinary events, but also to zinnias on a kitchen table—functions here as a sort of Achilles' heel for the poet. Her occasional under-estimations of the ordinary, as opposed to her eagerness to point up the dramatic, work like insidious cracks weakening or diverting the emotional intensity of some of these poems. Perhaps the poet relies, in places, not confidently enough on her own perceptive gifts, although her talent is evident in the arresting detail of “Locker Room Conversation” or in the delightful opening poem, which depicts dogs plunging “straight into / The foaming breakers // Like diving birds, letting the green turbulence / Toss them, until they snap and sink // Teeth into floating wood / Then bound back to their owners.” This canine image of “passionate speed / For nothing, / For absolutely nothing but joy” is the touchstone—not yet marred by illness or moral iniquity—against which the reader will measure the destructive cracks in everything else. Interestingly, some longer poems begin as detailed, firmly-structured narratives, then conclude in fragments or with an oblique, even dissociated, twist—a sign, too, that a former wholeness has crumbled. This quality is particularly striking in a diary-like poem, “Taylor Lake,” where Ostriker first relates a family hike in the mountains, then abruptly records the tale of a man who has sat down with children in a sandbox.

Too many poems, however, include facile pronouncements. In “The Vocabulary of Joy,” for example, Ostriker exclaims her “happiness” while she watches a laughing, racially-mixed family—a sentiment that she cannot convey more graphically, however, for she adds only: “Though surely you know what I mean / In the late twentieth century // When I say this.” It is a pity that Ostriker has not dissected her “happiness”; such remarks in any case dull the vibrancy of the present, which she had nevertheless evoked with gusto: “Father to shoulders hoists / Their slender redhead daughter, who // Laughs and shouts, pulling his hair, / You're fun, Daddy.” “Lockout” similarly perks our interest in a campus security guard who helps the poet unlock her office door; yet we never get to know this man, for the poem turns to the way he was treated at school: “They hit my hands with rulers and made me eat soap / For speaking my own language, Spanish.” We sympathize, but the poem goes no further than this revelation of organized brutality; the security guard is ultimately used as a mere political symbol.

This tendency to take stands crops up even in the complex, ambitious long-poem, “The Book of Life,” which is a challenging exploration of Judaism. A few cumbersome lines (“She used to describe the folk music scene in America / —Before money made a hole in it / And the joy spilled out”) distract from the poignancy of a folksinger's death. “Her daughters assembled,” writes Ostriker, “As she slept and woke, slept and moaned. / They made the decision to switch / To the intravenous.” This simple, moving scene illustrates our (once again) late-twentieth-century manner of seeing off our parents and loved-ones. In contrast to allusions to ever-shifting socio-economic realities, do not these grave gestures and the random, telling remembrances that follow (“A pair of butter-soft, cherry-red / Italian gloves … / her tragicomic love affairs, / Her taste in flowers, Catalan cooking, / Shelves of tattered blues and flamenco records”), suffice in giving us the essential—a lasting, universal emotion?