SOURCE: A review of The Crack in Everything, in World Literature Today, Vol. 71, No. 1, Winter, 1997, pp. 156.

In the following review, Earnshaw applauds Ostriker's achievement in The Crack in Everything.

In her eighth volume of poems [The Crack in Everything], Alicia Suskin Ostriker puts no barriers of arcane language between herself and her reader. Her style combines acute observation in plain speech with halting rhythms of run-on lines as though she is thinking it out as she goes. Most poems begin with a setting: the beach, a bar, dance floor, classroom, hospital. The characters and story unwind, holding us charmed until the poem ends with a question, an ambiguity, an enlightenment. A mature American woman's voice speaks deliberately of her many concerns: her marriage, family relations, war horrors abroad, needy students, and, surprisingly, in a final series of poems, her mastectomy.

The forty-plus poems, most of them previously published...