No Heaven

by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Overview

Alicia Suskin Ostriker's voice has long been acknowledged as a major force in American poetry. In No Heaven, her eleventh collection, she takes a hint from John Lennon's "Imagine" to wrestle with the world as it is: "no hell below us, / above us only sky." It is a world of cities, including New York, London, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where the poet can celebrate pickup basketball, peace marches, and the energy of graffiti. It is also a world of families, generations coming and going, of love, love affairs, and friendship. Then it is a world full of art and music, of Rembrandt and Bonnard, Mozart and Brahms. Finally, it is a world haunted by violence and war. No Heaven rises to a climax with elegies for Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli zealot, and for the poet's mother, whose death is experienced in the context of a post-9/11 impulse to destroy that seems to seduce whole nations. Yet Ostriker's ultimate stance is to "Try to praise the mutilated world," as the poet Adam Zagajewski has counseled. At times lyric, at times satiric, Ostriker steadfastly pursuesin No Heaven her poetics of ardor, a passion for the here and now that has chastened and consoled her many devoted readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822979890
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	04/17/2005
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	553 KB

About the Author

Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s previous collections of poetry include The Imaginary Lover, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, and The Crack in Everything and The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, both National Book Award finalists. She has also received the Paterson Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award. Of her five volumes of criticism, including Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic. She is professor of English at Rutgers University and teaches in the MFA program of New England College.
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.

Table of Contents

Contents Vocation I. Here and Now Birdcall Bus Station Correspondence Brooklyn Twilight Pickup One-Minded Liking It Crosstown Cigarettes In the Fory-Fifth Year of Marriage Running out the Clock Wilderness The Speech of the Creature What You Cannot Remember, What You Cannot Know May Rain, Princeton Baby Carriages What Is Needed After Food Ciy Through Which Time Rushes Like Water Poem Beginning with a Line by Rumi II. Archival Normal Light Lexer of Inquiry He Gets Depressed Whenever We Argue The Idea of Making Love Another Imaginary Voyage Extended Sonnet Misery and Frustration Mid-February Coastal Dawn III. Material Density Wooden Virgin with Child The Kiss of Judas The Birth of Venus Caravaggio: The Painting of Force and Violence RVR: Work and Love Asylum: Corot at the Ville D’Avray Homage to Redon Bonnard Retrospective Cosi Fan Tuxe: Of Desire and Delight Schumann Op. 16: The Greater Happiness Janacek, String Quartet # 1 Ravel Piano Trio The Fauré Requiem An Album of Chinese Fan Paintings IV. Tearing the Poem Up Squirrels A Walker in the Ciy A Voice at the Rally Three Women The Othello Sarabande, or: The Occupation Elegy for Allen Tearing the Poem Up and Eating It Divrei Fix The Window at the Moment of Flame From the Moon Poem Sixy Years After Auschwitz Hunger Elegy before the War Dafodils Coda Coda: Into the Street Notes Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

A long-prominent poet and feminist critic (Stealing the Language), Ostriker further plumbs subjects of previous work: sectarian violence, urban geography, family history, easel painting and Jewish identity. If Ostriker sacrifices verbal nuance for moral clarity, she nonetheless makes her persona and views appealingly present on every page. Clean, unambiguous lines (reminiscent of Robert Pinsky's) present her speaker as an explainer, a bringer of news: "Sometimes I feel like a mailman who faithfully visits each door in his district,/ Sometimes like a mermaid out of water." Ambivalent poems about New York, Jerusalem and Berlin praise "days when to walk a city/ is like feeling completely healed." A group of poems responds to major works of Eastern and Western painting and classical music, like Botticelli's, Mozart's and Bonnard's "mysteries of domestic/ Life in the modern void." Ostriker has achieved recent prominence with nonfiction devoted to Jewish experience, and she ends with an emphasis there; a final set of ambitious longer poems juxtaposes a history of suffering, recent events in Israel, the Iraq war and the travails of the poet's mother. "Where did she go, my hopeful young mother/ My mother who promised we would overcome/ The bosses and bigots?" Ostriker concludes: "I want her// To come back and try again." (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A long-prominent poet and feminist critic (Stealing the Language), Ostriker further plumbs subjects of previous work: sectarian violence, urban geography, family history, easel painting, and Jewish identity.  If Ostriker sacrifices verbal nuance for moral clarity, she nonetheless makes her persona and views appealingly present on every page.”
—Publishers Weekly


“Edgy, erotic, funny, and ornery. . . .Ostriker’s tonic poems remind us that although we are the animal that kills out of rage and greed, we are also creatures of grace and harmony.” 
—Booklist

"In No Heaven Alicia Ostriker is at the top of her form. The poems ‘hang in the air like Nijinsky taking a nap’—no need of heaven when the living can perform such feats."

—Diane Middlebrook

“Ostriker’s poems connect to the reader—and to one another—to deliver a owerful and complex story. ‘No Heaven’ offers lots of reading experiences that you don’t expect when you pick up a book of poetry. The poems are alternately beautiful, startling and perceptive. But reading through the breadth of Ostriker’s work, you will find that her poetry gains momentum, following upon itself with nuanced skill, successive poems building to deliver a message  more complex than any single poem.”

—Metroactive

"As attentive to injustice as it is to the varieties of the sensual life, No Heaven is evidence of a deep engagement with what it means and feels like to be a person of high consciousness in the early twenty-first century. This is a lover’s book; that is, a book by someone who loves people enough to show all their sides, and the world enough to be furious with it. It gives us Ostriker at her most capacious."

—Stephen Dunn

"No Heaven is Ostriker at her best. The elegiac poems that sing to her dead mother and characterize an eroding America as ‘this moon-shaped blankness’ are deeply compelling."

—Maxine Kumin

From the Publisher