Volcano Sequence

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.

Alicia Ostriker's the volcano sequence is a record of what one poem calls, 'the tangled quarrel' in her art, the quarrel with reality, the quarrel with our names for the ultimate, the quarrel with the pain and difficulty of a woman's life and women's life, and of birth, and age and death. Her voice is by turns bitter, lyrical, cajoling, ironic, her quarrel is a prophet's quarrel with a divine presence, sometimes distant and male, sometimes close and female, sometimes refracted through ancient psalms and texts, and other times as present and near as the pain in a beggar's face. This is theology lived in the flesh, her struggle to be the 'aperture,' the voice and mouth of what is real.