•  Ostriker wrote twelve poems in The Crack in Everything (1996) that center on her experience with undergoing a mastectomy. The speaker in these poems focuses on her responses to the diagnosis, the surgery, and the aftermath as she tries to adjust to her new body. One especially poignant poem is “Normal,” which focuses on others’ as well as her own response to the operation.

•  Ostriker’s controversial treatise on literary feminism, Stealing the Language, was published in 1986. This work proposes that only women can have an authentic voice when constructing female literary characters.

•  The Cancer Journals (1980), by Audre Lorde, is a courageous chronicle of Lorde’s struggle with breast cancer and radical mastectomy and the support she received from her community of women. Lorde was one of...