
The Crack In Everything (Pitt Poetry Series)
Paperback
Description
Praise For The Crack In Everything (Pitt Poetry Series)…
--New York Times Book Review
--The Nation
“Ostriker slips us into the cave of her own vision and strikes a match, and that world, its deep shadows and clear places, is illuminated by a high, bright flame.”
—Southern Poetry Review
“This is a wonderfully honest confrontation with the world. The Crack in Everything, a beautifully appropriate title, is Ostriker's eighth poetry collection, a quantitative testament in itself. But it is the honesty, the power of the will to face reality, the insight, the poetic skill obvious in this book that marks her as one of the chosen. This is the work of a major talent, an important voice.”
—Kliatt
“While her poetry has never shunned the autobiographical, here we read a poetic account whose candor and detail and intimacy are nevertheless unusual. It is unusual not only because its subject is a mastectomy, and not only because the loss of the breast is rendered in a style so direct and literal as to injure the conventions of shame and secrecy associated with breast cancer, but also because the breast seems intimately related to Ostriker's sense of self. . . . It is this identity that is mourned—though never without irony and therefore always without self-pity. . . . Both the degree of her self-exposure and the intensity of her mourning should serve her fellow-sufferers well—even if the loss of the breast is indeed a sublime exemplification of Ostriker's poetics of the temporary nature of beauty.”
—Literature and Medicine
University of Pittsburgh Press, 9780822955931, 112pp.
Publication Date: April 11, 1996