The Imaginary Lover

by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Overview

• Winner of the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award presented by the Poetry Society of AmericaWith The Imaginary Lover, Alicia 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:	9780822980896
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	11/15/2014
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	228 KB

About the Author

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
I
Cows
Horses
Beer
Wishes
Dissolve in Slow Motion
The Contest
The Woman Who Ran Away
The Game
Rainy Season
Three Men Walking, Three Brown Silhouettes
Widow in a Stone House
Digging to China
Mother in Airport Parking Lot
Upper Broadway Sunday
II
Meeting the Dead
Sex Dream
Listen
A Question of Time
The Unsaid
The Hurt Eye
Wanting All
In the Twenty-Fifth Year of Marriage It Goes On
Years
Surviving
The Marriage Nocturne
III
Poem Beginning with a Line by Dickinson
I Brood About Some Concepts, for Example
Taking the Shuttle with Franz
Everywoman Her Own Theology
Taverna, Athens 1974
Lamenting the Inevitable
Poem Beginning with a Line by Fitzgerald/Hemingway
An Army of Lovers
Terror
Warning
The War of Men and Women
IV
Staring at the Pacific, and Swimming in It
Death Is Only
What Else
While Driving North
Irises
The Hawk's Shadow
A Clearing by a Stream
Stanzas in October
Other Stanzas, to You, Pythagoras
Nostos
Letting the Doves Out

Editorial Reviews

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

"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