Wednesday, March 1, 7:45 pm

"Now that Ginsberg is gone, Ostriker is contemporary poetry's most Blakean figure." --Women's Review of Books

"All of us who are women poets, idol breakers, and revisionists. . . feel a deep kinship to the work of Alicia Ostriker, and a debt as well."
--Eleanor Wilner

"Among the finest American poets"--World Literature Today
Author of nine books of poetry, including last year's The Little Space, Alicia Ostriker has become, in Joyce Carol Oates' words, "one of those brilliantly provocative and imaginatively gifted contemporaries whose iconoclastic expression…is essential to our understanding of our American selves." Two of her books of poems have been finalists for the National Book Award; The Crack in Everything won the Paterson Poetry Prize, and The Imaginary Lover won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her critical works include the ground-breaking Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (1986) and the more recent The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1994).

As I grow older
I love it less, the evil seems denser,

More strangely skewed,
My world uglier and myself weaker.
Still I keep my original loyalty,

My memory--a child on a busy
Sidewalk looking around and thinking
Beautiful dirty city, beautiful planet

I have my task,
What matter if I can
Never accomplish it.

~from Green Age