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:	9780822958758
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	03/15/2005
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.88(h) x 0.40(d)

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.

Table of Contents

	Vocation	3
I	Here and Now
	Birdcall	7
	Bus Station	9
	Correspondence	10
	Brooklyn Twilight	12
	Pickup	13
	One-Minded	14
	Liking It	16
	Crosstown	18
	Cigarettes	20
	In the Forty-Fifth Year of Marriage	22
	Running out the Clock	24
	Wilderness	26
	The Speech of the Creature	27
	What You Cannot Remember, What You Cannot Know	29
	May Rain, Princeton	30
	Baby Carriages	31
	What Is Needed After Food	32
	City Through Which Time Rushes Like Water	34
	Poem Beginning with a Line by Rumi	36
II	Archival
	Normal Light	41
	Letter of Inquiry	42
	He Gets Depressed Whenever We Argue	44
	The Idea of Making Love	47
	Another Imaginary Voyage	48
	Extended Sonnet	50
	Misery and Frustration	51
	Mid-February	53
	Coastal Dawn	54
III	Material Density
	Wooden Virgin with Child	57
	The Kiss of Judas	58
	The Birth of Venus	60
	Caravaggio: The Painting of Force and Violence	66
	RVR: Work and Love	69
	Asylum: Corot at the Ville D'Avray	71
	Homage to Redon	72
	Bonnard Retrospective	73
	Cosi Fan Tutte: Of Desire and Delight	75
	Schumann Op. 16: The Greater Happiness	78
	Janacek, String Quartet #I	80
	Ravel Piano Trio	82
	The Faure Requiem	83
	An Album of Chinese Fan Paintings	84
IV	Tearing the Poem Up
	Squirrels	89
	A Walker in the City	90
	A Voice at the Rally	94
	Three Women	95
	The Othello Sarabande, or: The Occupation	98
	Elegy for Allen	101
	Tearing the Poem Up and Eating It	103
	Divrei	107
	Fix	108
	The Window at the Moment of Flame	110
	From the Moon	111
	Poem Sixty Years After Auschwitz	112
	Hunger	114
	Elegy before the War	117
	Daffodils	126
	Coda
	Coda: Into the Street	131
	Notes	133
	Acknowledgments	135

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.”
—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

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