SOURCE: “Profile: Alicia Suskin Ostriker,” in Belles Lettres, Vol. 8, No. 3, Spring, 1993, pp. 26-9.

In the following essay, Rosenberg sketches Ostriker's life and career, incorporating the writer's own comments on her work as both poet and mother.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker, 55, was one of the first women in America to publish poems about her experience as a mother. She began composing the title poem of the chapbook, Once More Out of Darkness, during her second pregnancy in 1964-5. “I started writing about motherhood almost as soon as I was a mother. My first long poem about pregnancy and birth was put together from jottings I'd made during my first two pregnancies, which were 18 months apart. At that time, I was writing because writing was what I did. It didn't occur to me that I hadn't seen any poetry about pregnancy and childbirth until I was well along in shaping that...