Waiting for the Light

by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Overview

What is it like living today in the chaos of a city that is at once brutal and beautiful, heir to immigrant ancestors "who supposed their children's children would be rich and free?" What is it to live in the chaos of a world driven by "intolerable, unquenchable human desire?" How do we cope with all the wars? In the midst of the dark matter and dark energy of the universe, do we know what train we're on? In this cornucopia of a book, Ostriker finds herself immersed in phenomena ranging from a first snowfall in New York City to the Tibetan diaspora, asking questions that have no reply, writing poems in which "the arrow may be blown off course by storm and returned by miracle."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822982470
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	03/18/2017
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
File size:	1 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 One August Morning, Upper Broadway The Light How Fortunate the Boy Q&A: Red Red Rose Manahatta The First Snowfall The Glory of Cities Bangladesh: The Driver Guyana: So Nice Times Square Dry Hours: A Golden Shovel Exercise Two The City Crocuses Cinco de Mayo Biking to the George Washington Bridge Ghazal: The Minimum Wage, 2014 Dark Matter and Dark Energy Ghazal: O Clear Night Four Men around a Card Table, Columbus & 97th A Walker in the City Acrostic: All You Need Is Love Waiting for the Light For Once, Then, Something Three Ghazal: America Afghanistan: The Raped Girl White Morning Ghazal: Not Even There Q&A: Insurance Making a Meal of Them The World According to Capa Are You My Cousin The Battlefield: A Lyric Children’s Blood Temblor Four Alphabetical Flash The Liberal Arts The Common Crow Fibonacci The Redeemed World To Charlie, on His Poetry China in the Twenty-First Century Underground Ghazal: America the Beautiful Q&A: Reality Notes Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

05/08/2017
“Do you agree that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice// Why would you think that,” asks Ostriker (The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog) in an eerily prophetic moment toward the end of a collection in which she explores politics and people with her characteristic complexity and curiosity. The book is divided into four sections, the first two of which explore the vibrant microcosm of New York as depicted through a series of vignettes. In one, she describes a father whose son is killed in a traffic accident, and in the other she recalls a conversation with a Bangladeshi cab driver who “sighs a long, elegiac sigh,/ like a man who secretly knows how soon/ the world will be under water/ but does not wish to discuss it.” In one of the collection’s several ghazals, Ostriker skillfully unpacks the multiple meanings and associations of the word “America”: “I said One Nation Invisible until corrected/ maybe I was right about America.” Ostriker keeps a record of violence, inequality, and despair in the world, yet through it all finds refuge in a world of hope in which “you put on peace every day/ like pulling on a pair of pants.” (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

‘Let us now praise famous cities,’ says Alicia Ostriker in Waiting for the Light. Indeed, let us now praise these poems, their ferocity, tenderness, intelligence, compassion, and joy. A seeker and seer in the tradition of Whitman, Ostriker searches for the ‘light that stabs me with joy’ amid the sidewalks, schoolyards, marketplaces, and many tongues of her beloved New York, spurred by ‘ancestors who remember tenements.’ A walker in the city and a walker in the world, she knows about the flow of dollars and blood through the streets, speaking fearlessly against whoever crushes the body and the spirit. Wait for the light no longer; the light is right here, in the pages of this book.”
—Martín Espada


“Ostriker so loves the world, its griefs, traumas, praises, mysteries, and joys, that she teaches us to love the world with her—sometimes desperately, heartbrokenly, never despairingly. Ostriker is an essential poet, writing at the height of her powers.”
—Daisy Fried

From the Publisher