Volcano and After

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.

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.’