The Crack In Everything

by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

This volume of poetry from Alicia Suskin Ostriker is one of her most ambitious, ranging from laments and celebrations for a flawed world to meditations on art and artists, to a powerful exploration of illness and healing.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry.

Reviews

[Alarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't imagine a more fitting title for this collection. It's taken from the epigraph by Leonard Cohen, "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in." The cracks in Ostriker's writing must remain in the first drafts, but the light always shines through these breathtaking poems. Often the last sentence flings the door to enlightenment wide open. Many of the poems are heart-wrenching, in a gifted poet's understated way, but she works humor into her poems, too, as Jews have long learned to laugh to stay sane. She even rephrases the Cohen quote in a funny way in section II: “The Book of Life.”

“Autumn mornings I hear my brain cells pop
One by one, emitting gentle sighs
Like the bubbles in plastic wrapping.”

My favorite section of the book, “The Mastectomy Poems,” will take every woman through a familiar fear or memory, from the radiologist’s first, Sorry, we need to do this again to the acceptance and optimism that the surgery gives her a good chance of a long life. (I didn’t realize this book was published in 1996, and Ostriker is now 84. I was relieved her hopes came true. I’m not quoting further from this section because these poems are most powerful read back-to-back.

Reader of this review, you were once born, so I hope you’ll enjoy this simile as much as I, from “After Illness.”

“…Look, getting sick
Was like being born,

They singled you out from among the others
With whom you were innocently twirling,
Doing a samba across the cumulonimbus,

They said you, they said now,

You had no opportunity to choose
This body or that, as you expected –
At the turnstile, somebody knocked you cold,
It was so unfair.”

[Sarah Lada · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my favorite book of poetry, but like the title suggests, it examines the cracks of various situations (be it teaching disadvantaged students or musing over a mastectomy) and finds the light. Because "that's how the light gets in."

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Diagonal rays gilding the fields / And the insects waking in them

[Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can hear the echo of Anne Sexton in Ostriker's "The Mastectomy Poems" and that's a good thing. The final section of "The Crack in Everything" is at once raw and disciplined, vulnerable and concise. Ostriker, like Sexton before her, is looking around her at suburban life and while she may be less critical, she's at least equally invested in telling it as she sees it whether it's dogs at the beach or young bodies at the disco, tragedies abroad or classroom dynamics at her job.

[Sherry Chandler · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review