Alicia Ostriker’s artistic and intellectual productions as a poet, critic, and essayist over the past 50 years are protean and have been profoundly influential to generations of readers, writers, and critics. In all her writings, both the feminist and the human engage fiercely with the material and metaphysical world. Ostriker is a poet concerned with questions of social justice, equality, religion, and how to live in a world marked by both beauty and tragedy.  Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker engages Ostriker’s poetry from throughout her career, including her first volume Songs, her award-winning collection The Imaginary Lover, and her more recent work in the collections No Heaven, the volcano sequence, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, and Waiting for the Light. Like her literary criticism and essays, Ostriker’s poetry explores themes of feminism, Jewish life, family, and social justice.  With insightful essays—some newly written for this collection—poets and literary critics including Toi Derricotte, Daisy Fried, Cynthia Hogue, Tony Hoagland, and Eleanor Wilner illuminate and open new pathways for critical engagement with Alicia Ostriker’s lifetime of poetic work.

Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker (Under Discussion)

Literature & Fiction

Smith, Martha Nell

Enszer, Julie R.

History & Criticism

University of Michigan Press

<p>Poetry. LGBT Studies. In her first collection, Julie R. Enszer offers poems that are as unabashedly erotic as they are unabashedly feminist. Whether responding to queer cultural icons, fantasizing about sex, or mourning illness and loss, these poems are sweet and sultry, fierce and tender.</p>

Handmade Love

Poetry

Sinister Wisdom

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Jewish Studies. In this land of MILK AND HONEY, poems flow. Contemporary Jewish, lesbian poets address an array of experiences—relationships between and among women, family relationships, politics, solitude, ethical responsibilities, history, solidarity, and community. MILK AND HONEY features beloved poets like Ellen Bass, Robin Becker, Elana Dykewomon, Marilyn Hacker, Eleanor Lerman, Joan Nestle, Lesléa Newman and Ellen Orleans, as well as new and emerging voices. With language and imagery that moves from the sensual and political to the tender and serene, MILK AND HONEY explores the vibrant, complicated, exhilarating experience of being Jewish and lesbian—or queer—in the world today.

Milk and Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry

<p>Julie R. Enszer's second collection mines the multiple meanings of sisterhood, exploring the burdens and joys of sisters, real and imagined. These poems ache with loss: of a sister, of friends from AIDS, of elder poets, of innocence, of exuberance and idealism in middle age. But at the same time, these poems affirm life: the desire of humans to live, to hold one another tightly, to build new ways of living amid fragile remains.</p>

Sisterhood

Parenting & Relationships

Sibling Rivalry Press, LLC

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Women's Studies. In the Jewish tradition, Lilith's punishment for rejecting Adam and disobeying God is to give birth to one hundred demons at twilight every night. These demons travel the land, killing newborns and wreaking havoc, until the sun rises anew. Julie R. Enszer reimagines Lilith and her demons for her third collection, LILITH'S DEMONS (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2015), giving them their own voices to speak to women of the world.  Recast as a contemporary embattled woman, Enszer's Lilith is fiercely independent and determined as well as vulnerable, exposed. Her demons bemoan their obligation to kill, carrying the weight of such actions every minute, every hour of their time on earth.  These poems offer a new mythology for women, reclaiming what is useful from the old and boldly striking new territory where women and their demons can be powerful. No longer dependent on God or man, Lilith and her demons convey a contemporary feminist cosmology.

Lilith's Demons

A Midsummer Night's Press