The Mother/Child Papers

by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Overview

In 1970, as the war in Vietnam was heating up, Ostriker was awaiting the birth of her son. On April 30, President Nixon announced the bombing of Cambodia. On May 14, four students were shot and killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University. The poems in this collection confront Ostriker’s personal tumult as she considered the world she had brought her son into.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822978268
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	02/22/2009
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	64
File size:	2 MB

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 Preface I. Cambodia II. Mother/Child III. The Spaces Letter to M. Song of the Abandoned One Macbeth and the Kids in the Cabin at Chester Things to Remember of Eve In the Autumn of My Thirty-Seventh Birthday Exile The Spaces Propaganda Poem: Maybe for Some Young Mamas The Leaf Pile The Seven Samurai, The Dolly, and Mary Cassatt The Change One, to Fly In the Dust His Speed and Strength IV: This Power One Marries This Power Dream

Editorial Reviews

Ostriker's work details the achievement of a connection between personal history and public fact as both present themselves to a very intelligent writer . . . Nothing in the novels of Margaret Drabble is as affecting, as convincing, as a few lines of Ostriker's.”
—American Poetry Review
 


“Brava/bravo to University of Pittsburgh Press for reissuing Ostriker's seminal work in the gradual accretion of powerful poetry by women about their bodies, their inner lives, their societal positions. Her feminist affirmation of motherhood comes against the backdrop of protests against the Vietnam War, the murders at Kent State, and the New York Times's revelation of The Pentagon Papers. Nowhere in late twentieth-century belles lettres has the personal inserted itself so meaningfully into the political.”
—Maxine Kumin


Past praise for The Mother/Child Papers
“It is startling to read the early pages of this book: where, before this, was the literature of squalid bliss and righteous woe of taking care of an infant? It is alive in Ostriker . . . one of the most intelligent and lyrical of American poets.”
—Iowa Review

From the Publisher