AT THAT TIME We were body surfing a wave of public rage attempting to swim it was terrific thrilling hate sprayed us on the left and on the right we wondered would it smash us into a reef the tyrant threw tantrums lies from his lips like eels it was a good moment […]
Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Ostriker was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937. Ostriker received a BA from Brandeis University in 1959 and an MA and PhD in literature, in 1961 and 1964 respectively, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of more than ten poetry collections, including her latest Waiting for the Light (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). Her numerous books of critical writing include Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic (University of Michigan Press, 2000), The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (Rutgers University Press, 1994), and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (Beacon Press, 1986). She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1976. In 2015, Ostriker was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is professor emerita of English at Rutgers University, and a faculty member of the Drew University’s low-residency poetry MFA program. She divides her time between New York City and Princeton, New Jersey.
Poetry, Politics, and an American Dream
September, 2021 What does poetry have to do with politics? For many people, nothing at all. But in my own career as a poet and critic, poetry and politics have repeatedly converged. When I had the honor of being named New York State Poet in 2018, I thought immediately of a deeply political poem […]
The New Sanctuary Movement
Editor’s Note: The unexpected consequence of the 2016 presidential election is the way that it coalesced America in resistance to moral outrage and awareness of principles on which the nation was built: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the […]
The Light
What is the birthplace of the light that stabs me with joy and what is the difference between avocados sold on the street by a young man conceived in Delhi and avocados sold in the West Side Market by cornrow girls, I am anyhow afloat in tides of Puertorican, Cuban, Mexican, Westindian Spanish, wavelets […]