The holy & broken bliss : poems in plague time

The holy & broken bliss Poems in plague time

Alicia Ostriker

Book - 2024

"Nationally acclaimed and multi-award-winning poet, Ostriker, brings The Holy & Broken Bliss to light after the pandemic--these keenly observant and urgent poems feel grounded in daily life, the rituals of living, and their tendernesses. Despite our deep flaws and imperfections, there can still be cause for joy, and there is always a reason for celebration. Poems find strength in marriage, appreciating an unbreakable bond in the middle of the world breaking down. Often, the spare lines of these poems enhance their feeling of inevitability, deepening the speakers' contemplations of death, writing in the face of death--not only from within the pandemic but by many plagues we are afflicted with. The poems ask us to consider what ...living looks like inside of ongoing misery (misery we often are responsible for making and accepting). They call us to ask ourselves how we make our lives meaningful, ourselves worthy when despair is ever-present. The Holy & Broken Bliss contemplates free will, autonomy, self-control, the commodification of ourselves, and our desires for vengeance, to be sated by anger, to be angry, and to weigh our collective sicknesses"--

Saved in:
Place a Hold Save to List Email this
1 being processed

2nd Floor New Shelf Show me where

811.54/Ostriker
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor New Shelf 811.54/Ostriker (NEW SHELF) Checked In
Subjects
American poetry.
Pandemics > Poetry.
Poetry.
Genres
Poetry
Published
New Gloucester, ME : Alice James Books [2024]
Language
English
Main Author
Alicia Ostriker (author)
Physical Description
88 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781949944679
  • These Be The Words…
  • I Cannot Do This In Prose
  • Time
  • Slowly
  • Slowly
  • We All Know
  • What They Say, Slowly They Say, They Say
  • Time
  • Plague Time Ritual I
  • Plague Time Ritual II
  • Summer
  • Evening In Plague Time
  • Demonstration In Plague Time
  • Haiku
  • Double Plague
  • All That Year
  • Elul
  • At The Center
  • Fever
  • The Salley Gardens
  • The High Board
  • Helpmate
  • Beauty (A Drop Of Dopamine)
  • Breakfast
  • Feeding Breadcrumbs To Birds
  • Time
  • Late Autumn Ginkgos
  • Keeping The Dragon
  • Oracle: In The Old Days
  • Oracle: After
  • The Parable Of The Umbrella Thorn Tree
  • Nocturne
  • Anything In Motion
  • Goldberg Variations In Double-Plague Time
  • Prayer
  • Late Winter In Plague Time
  • Solitude
  • When We Wake In The Morning
  • Tachycardia (Again)
  • Mother/Daughter Dream
  • Photo Of A Young Woman
  • The Mind Secedes
  • The Old Woman Reads Ecclesiastes And The Song Of Songs
  • Prayer To The Shekhinah
  • The Reply
  • Speaking Slowly, Softly, She Says
  • Confession: When I Chose Him
  • Ostinato
  • Some Nights
  • The Wings Ofthe Shekhinah (This One Afternoon While I Work At My Desk)
  • The Channel, The Pipe, She Says, They Say
  • The Force That Sends Light
  • Coda
  • After/Word
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Ostriker (Waiting for the Light) confronts the intricate dance between spiritual despair and revelatory beauty in her ethereal 17th collection. Her poems address time, ritual, plagues, oracles, and beauty as the speaker takes the broken world as she finds it and courageously steps over the line between the real and the metaphorical: "the lintel through that door./ Write or die." Reckoning with sacred texts in "The Old Woman Reads Ecclesiastes and The Song Of Songs," the speaker finds solace and companionship with the feminine half of God, where the body and soul are "broken and we/ alone required to mend it/ Where the angelic feminine, the Shekinanh keeps watch over the life:/ her wings are invisible/ like my wound." In "Photos of a Young Woman," the speaker reckons with the desire to merge into the unknown through both the husband and the divine kiss: "and when we were lovers pressing into each other mouth to mouth/ like God and Moses/ didn't our young bodies press and/ sing very much like that." This essential collection resonates long after the final page, reminding readers that even in a fractured, plague-stricken world, there is still a living, breathing force within all things. (Oct.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Similar Items