SOURCE: “No Pain, No Gain,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. XIV, No. 6, March, 1997, pp. 12-13.

In the following excerpt, Townsend highlights thematic concerns of The Crack in Everything.

In “The Class,” in Alicia Suskin Ostriker's eighth collection, The Crack in Everything, the speaker/teacher says her job is to give her students “permission / to gather pain into language,” to make an art that is not “divisible from dirt, / from rotten life,” because, she believes, “Against evidence … / Poetry heals or redeems suffering,” even if it is “not the poet who is healed, / But someone else, years later.” Ostriker examines subjects as diverse as “weightless / unstoppable neutrinos / leaving their silvery trace / in vacuum chambers,” a Times Square bag lady in her “cape of rusty razor blades,” three million dead “stacked … like sticks” in winter, or the “nectar / in the bottom of a cup / This blissfulness in which I strip...