“Ostriker's work details the achievement of a connection between personal history and public fact as both present themselves to a very intelligent writer . . . Nothing in the novels of Margaret Drabble is as affecting, as convincing, as a few lines of Ostriker's.”
—American Poetry Review

 

“Brava/bravo to University of Pittsburgh Press for reissuing Ostriker's seminal work in the gradual accretion of powerful poetry by women about their bodies, their inner lives, their societal positions. Her feminist affirmation of motherhood comes against the backdrop of protests against the Vietnam War, the murders at Kent State, and the New York Times's revelation of The Pentagon Papers. Nowhere in late twentieth-century belles lettres has the personal inserted itself so meaningfully into the political.”
—Maxine Kumin

Past praise for The Mother/Child Papers
“It is startling to read the early pages of this book: where, before this, was the literature of squalid bliss and righteous woe of taking care of an infant? It is alive in Ostriker . . . one of the most intelligent and lyrical of American poets.”
—Iowa Review