Engage with new poems on feminism and humanity from lauded poets Joan Larkin and Alicia Ostriker.

Joan Larkin’s latest, Old Stranger: Poems (Alice James Books, 2024), reckons with all of the moments that shape a woman’s life, and the many shapes a woman’s life can take—from mother to daughter to trauma survivor to feminist—asking the reader to contend with whether we can ever truly know ourselves: the other in the mirror. Alicia Ostriker‘s The Holy & Broken Bliss (Alice James Books, 2024) wrestles with mortality and marriage in the face of plagues—literal and figurative—while also celebrating life’s tenderness. Grounded in the rituals of the living in a world shattered by a global pandemic, by racism, and by human suffering, the observant and urgent poems in this collection contemplate free will, self-control, and self-commodification alongside small, daily joys and a quest for the divine.

Readings in Kray Hall with a reception to follow in the Viscusi Reading Room.

About the Poets:

Joan Larkin is the author of five previous poetry collections, including Blue Hanuman and My Body: New and Selected Poems. She has received the Audre Lorde Award, the Lambda Literary Award. She co-founded Out & Out Books during the 1970s feminist literary explosion, co-edited four anthologies, including Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, and has been a lifelong teacher. Larkin has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She received the 2011 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Photo by Jessica Madavo.

Alicia Ostriker has published nineteen 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. As a critic she is the author of the now-classic Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, and other books on poetry and on the Bible. Her most recent collections of poems are Waiting for the Light and The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019. Her poems have been translated into numerous languages, including Hebrew and Arabic. She was New York State Poet Laureate (2018-2021) and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2015-2020). She lives with her husband in New York City.