SOURCE: A review of Stealing the Language, in American Literature, Vol. 59, No. 3, October, 1987, pp. 464-67.

In the following review, Martin discusses the main themes of Stealing the Language, commending its personal style and the inclusiveness of poets represented.

Beginning with Claudine Hermann's imperative that women writers must be “voleuses de langue”—thieves of language—Alicia Ostriker studies the American women poets who have claimed a poetic voice in spite of a tradition that too often ignores women's writing. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America, then, is an extended discussion of the tradition of women's artistic self-assertion that defies masculine cultural hegemony; in addition, this study provides an analysis of the challenge posed by the feminist aesthetic to the centrality of post-modernist style. Asserting that the feminist movement has served as a catalyst for innovative poetry that addresses itself to the particular concerns of women...