No Heaven

No Heaven

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Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s voice has long been acknowledged as a major force in American poetry. In No Heaven, her eleventh collection, she takes a hint from John Lennon’s "Imagine" to wrestle with the world as it is: "no hell below us, / above us only sky."

It is a world of cities, including New York, London, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where the poet can celebrate pickup basketball, peace marches, and the energy of graffiti. It is also a world of families, generations coming and going, of love, love affairs, and friendship. Then it is a world full of art and music, of Rembrandt and Bonnard, Mozart and Brahms. Finally, it is a world haunted by violence and war. <I>No Heaven</I> rises to a climax with elegies for Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli zealot, and for the poet’s mother, whose death is experienced in the context of a post-9/11 impulse to destroy that seems to seduce whole nations.

Yet Ostriker’s ultimate stance is to "Try to praise the mutilated world," as the poet Adam Zagajewski has counseled. At times lyric, at times satiric, Ostriker steadfastly pursuesin No Heaven her poetics of ardor, a passion for the here and now that has chastened and consoled her many devoted readers.

A commentary on America, this book delves into major aspects of contemporary society and expounds upon the country’s qualities, both positive and negative.
“A long-prominent poet and feminist critic (Stealing the Language), Ostriker further plumbs subjects of previous work: sectarian violence, urban geography, family history, easel painting, and Jewish identity.  If Ostriker sacrifices verbal nuance for moral clarity, she nonetheless makes her persona and views appealingly present on every page.”
–Publishers Weekly
“Edgy, erotic, funny, and ornery. . . .Ostriker’s tonic poems remind us that although we are the animal that kills out of rage and greed, we are also creatures of grace and harmony.” 
–Booklist
“In No Heaven Alicia Ostriker is at the top of her form. The poems ‘hang in the air like Nijinsky taking a nap’—no need of heaven when the living can perform such feats.”

—Diane Middlebrook

“Ostriker’s poems connect to the reader–and to one another—to deliver a owerful and complex story. ‘No Heaven’ offers lots of reading experiences that you don’t expect when you pick up a book of poetry. The poems are alternately beautiful, startling and perceptive. But reading through the breadth of Ostriker’s work, you will find that her poetry gains momentum, following upon itself with nuanced skill, successive poems building to deliver a message  more complex than any single poem.”

–Metroactive
“As attentive to injustice as it is to the varieties of the sensual life, No Heaven is evidence of a deep engagement with what it means and feels like to be a person of high consciousness in the early twenty-first century. This is a lover’s book; that is, a book by someone who loves people enough to show all their sides, and the world enough to be furious with it. It gives us Ostriker at her most capacious.”

—Stephen Dunn

“No Heaven is Ostriker at her best. The elegiac poems that sing to her dead mother and characterize an eroding America as ‘this moon-shaped blankness’ are deeply compelling.”

—Maxine Kumin

Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s previous collections of poetry include The Imaginary Lover, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, and The Crack in Everything and The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, both National Book Award finalists. She has also received the Paterson Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award. Of her five volumes of criticism, including Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic. She is professor of English at Rutgers University and teaches in the MFA program of New England College.

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Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in