Alicia Suskin Ostriker is the author of eleven previous poetry collections, including: The Mother/Child Papers; No Heaven; the volcano sequence; and The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998. She has received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award. Ostirker is Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program of Drew University. (Author photo by J. P. Ostriker)
“Here is a hard, obdurate, elusive sort of beauty. Alicia Ostriker is not only one of our very best poets but one of our most crucial.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“Alicia Ostriker is a fool for beauty. She says so on 'West Fourth Street.' She is also a fool for wisdom but, like a smart sage, she does it slant. I'm shocked by these poems, shocked by how good they are. How many skins has she shed to get here? Just take a look at a short poem called 'Dear God' or 'Born in the USA' or fifteen others. Amazing.”
—Gerald Stern
“The Book of Seventy will speak to everyone: Alicia Ostriker's honest voice, her humor, her wisdom, her gutsiness; her scholarly, longing mind; her knowing body: 'my mind is a cervix / I can imagine anything'; and from the first page to the last, her long-recognized courage in facing down—even welcoming—just about everything.”
—Jean Valentine
University of Pittsburgh Press
