No Heaven

Alicia Suskin Ostriker

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780822979890
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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. No Heaven 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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Vocation
• I. Here and Now
• II. Archival
• III. Material Density
• IV. Tearing the Poem Up
• Coda
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author