The Holy & Broken Bliss: Poems in Plague Time

Ostriker (Waiting for the Light) confronts the intricate dance between spiritual despair and revelatory beauty in her ethereal 17th collection. Her poems address time, ritual, plagues, oracles, and beauty as the speaker takes the broken world as she finds it and courageously steps over the line between the real and the metaphorical: “the lintel through that door./ Write or die.” Reckoning with sacred texts in “The Old Woman Reads Ecclesiastes and The Song Of Songs,” the speaker finds solace and companionship with the feminine half of God, where the body and soul are “broken and we/ alone required to mend it/ Where the angelic feminine, the Shekinanh keeps watch over the life:/ her wings are invisible/ like my wound.” In “Photos of a Young Woman,” the speaker reckons with the desire to merge into the unknown through both the husband and the divine kiss: “and when we were lovers pressing into each other mouth to mouth/ like God and Moses/ didn’t our young bodies press and/ sing very much like that.” This essential collection resonates long after the final page, reminding readers that even in a fractured, plague-stricken world, there is still a living, breathing force within all things. (Oct.)