Alicia Ostriker has published 19 collections of poetry, been twice nominated for the National Book Award, and has twice received the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, among other honors.   Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The Atlantic, Prairie Schooner,  and other journals, and has been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic.  Her most recent collections of poems are Waiting for the Light and The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019.  She was New York State Poet Laureate for 2018-2021 and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2015-2020. She lives with her husband in New York City.

Alicia Ostriker's stunning new poems bring into sharp focus the ills of body and earth, and the nexus between destruction and self-destruction, affirmation and ambivalence. I turn to them as to a moral compass and spiritual barometer for our troubled times, a guidebook on questing and questioning. Ostriker's prophetic and empathic voice extends that of Janus and the Shekhinah into the 21st century, its registers most singular and uncompromising in their caring."
—Mihaela Moscaliuc

“Alicia Ostriker’s book The Holy & Broken Bliss arises from the enforced isolation of the COVID pandemic. The poems are poignant and frank in recounting the physical struggles and frailties of her and her husband’s later years, and rightfully outraged by her awareness of the degenerate politics, climate catastrophe and racial injustice of our times. The results are poems of spiritual yearning for the divine presence that are also firmly grounded in this world. What ties it all together is how Ostriker remembers the call in Deuteronomy to ‘choose life.’ Her poems ache with wisdom because she has found a way to live with pain that poets know—’born as we are within the wound.’ Read her for the solace, read her for the wisdom, read her for the realistic grace and the hard-earned balm.”
—Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022

"'What am I to make of all this beauty/ and all this sorrow'—this question animates these indelible poems of a great old age that face, at times embrace, the implacable, with a language spare but unsparing in its awareness, straight from the educated heart. Written deep in the vein, these poems are Alicia Ostriker, one of our most essential poets, at the top of her form as she looks unflinchingly ahead to where the cave mouth stands open, the 'water rushing through blackness…'"
—Eleanor Wilner

"Grief begins when we know we love someone deeply. As for plagues and wars, we see these things from inside this world of deepest intimacy when that person is leaving us. The Holy & Broken Bliss feels like a psalm, as Ostriker does the one incredible dance between the anxieties preceding both death and what lies beyond. This is Ostriker at her deepest clarity and beauty."
—Afaa M. Weaver, author of A Fire in the Hills