Reviews for The Crack in Everything were overwhelmingly positive, and several critics singled out the “Mastectomy Poems” for special notice. Doris Earnshaw in her review of the collection for World Literature Today finds the tone of the poems “sober and honest” with a “warmth at heart” and insists that “Ostriker puts no barriers of arcane language between herself and her reader.” Earnshaw also praises her “acute observation” in the poems. Marilyn Hacker, in her article “Tectonic Shifts,” calls Ostriker “an important American poet” and suggests that the collection affirms “the poet’s unique and contradictory role, at once storyteller and witness, s/he who makes of language not a prison but a prism, refracting and re-combining the spectrum of human possibilities.”

In her review for American Book Review, Sharon...