“This book is full of acceptance—not an enervated giving up, but a commitment to the way things are.”
--New York Times Book Review

“Alicia Ostriker’s work joins the humanitarian’s unalienated will to ameliorate suffering and share what’s of value (which energizes progressive political engagement) to the humanist’s hunger to re-engage with and continually redefine intellectual (specifically literary, also spiritual) traditions: the pedagogical passion. She is a Blake scholar and a Bible scholar, a feminist critic whose work continues to germinate a wider-branching, inclusive literary purview, a Jew whose writings are informed by, while they interrogate, that heritage and history. She is a mother and a teacher. She is also an important American poet, whose writing is enriched, and enriches its readers, by all those sometimes conflicting identities.”
--The Nation

“Ostriker slips us into the cave of her own vision and strikes a match, and that world, its deep shadows and clear places, is illuminated by a high, bright flame.”

—Southern Poetry Review