Ostriker, Alicia: The Holy and Broken Bliss

Alice James Books, paperback

Publication Date: October 8, 2024

Publisher Marketing: Nationally acclaimed and multi-award-winning poet, Ostriker, brings her seventeenth collection, The Holy & Broken Bliss, to light after the pandemic--these keenly observant and urgent poems feel grounded in daily life, the rituals of living, and their tendernesses. Despite our deep flaws and imperfections, there can still be cause for joy, and there is always a reason for celebration. Poems find strength in marriage, appreciating an unbreakable bond in the middle of the world breaking down. Often, the spare lines of these poems enhance their feeling of inevitability, deepening the speakers' contemplations of death, writing in the face of death--not only from within the pandemic but by many plagues we are afflicted with.

The poems ask us to consider what living looks like inside of ongoing misery (misery we often are responsible for making and accepting). They call us to ask ourselves how we make our lives meaningful, ourselves worthy when despair is ever-present. The Holy & Broken Bliss contemplates free will, autonomy, self-control, the commodification of ourselves, and our desires for vengeance, to be sated by anger, to be angry, and to weigh our collective sicknesses.