SOURCE: “Tectonic Shifts,” in The Nation, Vol. 264, No. 18, May 12, 1997, pp. 54-7.

In the following review, Hacker concentrates on the themes of The Crack in Everything, ranging from female artists, classroom experiences, and the physical and emotional scars of breast cancer.

Alicia Ostriker's work joins the humanitarian's unalienated will to ameliorate suffering and share what's of value (which energizes progressive political engagement) to the humanist's hunger to re-engage with and continually redefine intellectual (specifically literary, also spiritual) traditions: the pedagogical passion. She is a Blake scholar and a Bible scholar, a feminist critic whose work continues to germinate a wider-branching, inclusive literary purview, a Jew whose writings are informed by, while they interrogate, that heritage and history. She is a mother and a teacher. She is also an important American poet, whose writing is enriched, and enriches its readers, by all those sometimes conflicting identities.

The Crack in Everything...