Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker’s artistic and intellectual productions as a poet, critic, and essayist over the past 50 years are protean and have been profoundly influential to generations of readers, writers, and critics. Her poetry, literary criticism, all her writings are both feminist and human in their fierce engagements with the material and metaphysical world. Ostriker as a poet is concerned with questions of social justice, equality, religion, and how to live in a world marked by both beauty and tragedy.Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker engages Ostriker’s poetry from throughout her career, including her first volume Songs, her award-winning collection The Imaginary Lover, and her more recent work, No Heaven, The Volcano Sequence, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, and Waiting for the Light. Like her literary criticism and essays, Ostriker’s poetry explores themes of feminism, Jewish life, family, and social justice.

Everywoman Her Own Theology includes work from poets and literary critics to illuminate Ostriker’s poems and her collections of poetry. With insightful new essays by Jenny Factor, Diana Hume George, Jill Hammer, Richard Tayson, Jacqueline Osherow, Tony Hoagland, Eric Selinger, Wesley McNair, Toi Derricotte, Afaa Michael Weaver, Eleanor Wilner and others, Everywoman Her Own Theology opens new pathways for critical engagements of Ostriker’s poetic work.