The Imaginary Lover

by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Overview

• Winner of the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award presented by the Poetry Society of America

With The Imaginary Lover, Alicia Suskin Ostriker takes her place among the most striking and original poets whose work is informed by feminist consciousness.  Her characterization of the best poetry by women, in the New York Times Book Review, aptly describes this book: “intimate rather than remote, passionate rather than distant, defying divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader.”  To read her poems is to “discover not only more of what it means to be a woman but more of what it means to be human.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822953852
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/02/1986
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is one of America’s premier visionary poets and critics.  She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including The Book of Seventy; The Mother/Child Papers; No Heaven; the volcano sequence; and The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968–1998, as well as several books on the Bible.  She has received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award. Ostriker is Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program of Drew University.

Editorial Reviews

"Delivers hard personal lyric, often in narrative rhythm: she is more reporter than embroiderer or musician. When the voice of this rational, scholarly woman rises to crescendo, a tide of sweet human emotion lifts the poem into the realm of true experience with Keatsian intensity."
—Publishers Weekly


"The candor and thoughtfulness of the poems are winning. . . . Even stronger than elegy is Ostriker's tendency to locate a sustaining force for the rest of life—a force that is both passionate and honorable."
—New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

Despite having published five books of poetry, Ostriker is known primarily for her role in the vanguard of feminist literary criticism. Outspoken, passionate and contentious, she has sparked controversy as a defender of what she regards as an emerging tradition of women's poetry. To a certain degree, her poetry reflects her social concerns; yet to a surprising extent, her work transcends such concerns. Hers is a poetry of commitment, not so much to womankind as to humankind. She delivers hard personal lyric, often in narrative rhythm: she is more reporter than embroiderer or musician. When the voice of this rational, scholarly woman rises to crescendo, a tide of sweet human emotion lifts the poem into the realm of true experience with Keatsian intensity. In no way derivative of the many fine women poets she has championed, she is forging a clear, individual style of her own. Her poetry stands on its own considerable merits as exemplum of the examined life. (November)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In a recent New York Times Book Review , Ostriker wrote that the best of women's poetry defies ``divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader.'' Ostriker definitely defies these divisions here. The poems are personal, often intimate; they dare to deal with emotion while managing to avoid sentimentality. Occasionally, the poet seems to be telling readers how to feel instead of allowing them their own emotional responses, but overall, The Imaginary Lover is a very human, moving book that invites us to ``join our life with the dangerous life of the other.'' Grace Bauer, formerly with New Orleans P.L.

Library Journal