Alicia Ostriker Quotes

United States, Poet
November 11, 1937

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet," by Progressive.. In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018 she was named New York State Poet.

Also known as Scholar

The mind is a leaf pile where you can bury anything....

Alicia Ostriker
- Mind
- Bury
- Pile
I love the combination of smartness, pain, and what one might call conscious postmodern trashiness in this book: a version of the erotic full of nervous tension which animates the sensuality, and also Zimroth's feeling for words, compressed, ironic, withholding, but also 'asking for it . . . the siege, the thrill, the battle fatigue.' A profoundly urban book, of harsh memory and fantasy, set in harsher reality.

Alicia Ostriker

Somewhere under the hurricane a sea turtle rows through silence.

Alicia Ostriker
- Silence
- Hurricane
- Turtle
The appropriation of the creativity-procreativity metaphor by women is a conscious challenge to traditional poetics and beyond that to traditional metaphysics, for the gynocentric vision is not that Logos condescends to incarnate itself, but that Flesh becomes Word.

Alicia Ostriker
Passing that fiery tree – if only she could; Be making love, Be making poetry, Be exploding, be speeding through the universe; Like a photon, like a shower; Of yellow blazes...

Alicia Ostriker
- Love
- Universe
- Poetry
The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers.

Alicia Ostriker
Anyway, what is the soul but a dream of itself?

Alicia Ostriker
- Soul
- Dream
With women poets we look at or into, but not up at, sacred things; we unlearn submission.

Alicia Ostriker
- Poets
- Submission
- Unlearn

Art destroys silence.

Alicia Ostriker
- Art
- Silence
- Destroys
The work of Jana Harris is unique in American writing. She has always had a voice of true grit—sometimes harsh, sometimes funny, always close to the bone, tart, and indomitable.

Alicia Ostriker
- Work
- Writing
- Voice