The Mother/Child Papers

So many women shed shame and took heart from The Mother/Child Papers, which feels as fresh and necessary as ever-feminism without dogma, motherhood without sanctimony, the power of the pen dipped in blood: this time not of battle but of birth. Rejoicing at its return, I recall how far this book-awakening us to all that had been left out of literature-was ahead of the curve: gravity's rainbow, the trajectory of a culture's once heaven-bound imagination, headed back to Earth.

Interweaving meditations on birthing, motherhood, and marriage with meditations on her shock and dismay at Nixon's command to bomb Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State, Alicia Ostriker's Mother/Child Papers were composed thirty years ago, but have lost none of their urgency, their necessity, to the years. Our wars continue to plague our souls; a woman's right to choose remains a major political debate. These poems offer no glib answers, but are a welcome call to power.

Past praise for The Mother/Child Papers"It is startling to read the early pages of this book: where, before this, was the literature of squalid bliss and righteous woe of taking care of an infant? It is alive in Ostriker . . . one of the most intelligent and lyrical of American poets."

Ostriker's work details the achievement of a connection between personal history and public fact as both present themselves to a very intelligent writer . . . Nothing in the novels of Margaret Drabble is as affecting, as convincing, as a few lines of Ostriker's.

The poems of The Mother/Child Papers have been influential not only because of their candid treatment of giving bith and mothering, and their frank expression of erotic pleasure derived by mothers, but surely because of the range of approaches taken by the poet . . . No one style predominates, and one of the enjoyable things about reading the book is the shifting of form and pace.