SOURCE: “An Aesthetic of Pain,” in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 58, No. 1, Spring, 1984, pp. 82-84.

In the following review, Broe highlights various thematic and formal concerns in A Woman Under the Surface which, according to Broe, revise the relation between contemporary feminist artistic principles and female life.

Like Orpheus, Alicia Ostriker makes “that journey / Down from song, down to the impulse of singing” in her fifth volume of poems, A Woman Under the Surface. But unlike Orpheus, who “could not carry, haul, rob / His bride back,” Ostriker makes us feel the unsentimental solid-iron aesthetic of pain, fear, and bitter beauty that undercuts her singing. In “For the Daughters” she announces:

Song, as you gather it, is not desire, Not some requirement you may finally fill. Song is being. For the god, trivial. But when are we? And when does he deliver 

To our existence here the earth and stars? 

Within...