The Volcano and After

Selected and New Poems 2002-2019

These capacious poems are smart, passionate, witty, acutely observant, heart-stabbing. They contain multitudes, embracing both ‘hot beauty’ and ‘thick and magnificent rage,’ ‘the impulse to destroy’ and ‘the body...keen for pleasure again,’ along with a bounty of other precise nuances of thought and perception. Alicia Ostriker binds together the contradictions of our contemporary lives in an insistent music that does what all real poetry does—‘it becomes true.’
Ellen Bass

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Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s passionate voice has long been acknowledged as a vital force in American poetry. From urgent spiritual quest to biting political satire, from elegy to comedy, from celebration of the city street and the world “as a paradise might be / if we had eyes to see,” to the “crack in earth . . . crack in her mind,” from brilliant evocations of art and music to mother-daughter wrestlings, Ostriker’s poetry rings with insistence on beauty and truth. Drawing from six of her previous books, and highlighting a sequence of bold new poems exploring the challenges and absurdities of aging, The Volcano and After is a masterpiece for our time.

214 Pages, 6.2 x 9.2 in.

September, 2020

isbn : 9780822946403

about the author

Alicia Suskin Ostriker

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.

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Alicia Suskin Ostriker