Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s passionate voice has long been acknowledged as a vital force in American poetry.  From urgent spiritual quest to biting political satire, from elegy to comedy, from celebration of the city street and the world “as a paradise might be / if we had eyes to see,” to the “crack in earth . . . crack in her mind,” from brilliant evocations of art and music to mother-daughter wrestlings, Ostriker’s poetry rings with insistence on beauty and truth. Drawing from six of her previous books, and highlighting a sequence of bold new poems exploring the challenges and absurdities of aging, The Volcano and After is a masterpiece for our time.
 
OLD WOMAN AT THE RIVER
On the bank of the river
I slide inside my sleeping bag
sleep is good if I am not
kept awake by coughing
the sound of the water soothes
time passes and does not pass
when I am better I will sit
and meditate for a while
there may be birds to listen to
then I will step down the bank
and put my naked foot in the water
which will shock at first,
being so cold, so swift.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is a major American poet and critic.  She is the author of sixteen previous poetry collections, including The Book of Seventy and Waiting for the Light, both winners of the National Jewish Book Award, and The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog.  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.  Her critical work includes the now-classic Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America, and other books on poetry and on the Bible. A Distinguished Professor Emerita of Rutgers University, Ostriker is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and the New York State Poet Laureate.