The Holy & Broken Bliss

“[P]oets thrive on disaster / born as we are within the wound,” writes Alicia Ostriker in The Holy & Broken Bliss. In this, the poet’s 17th, collection, an aging speaker wrestles with her own looming mortality while simultaneously bearing witness to a “virus that has slain its millions” and to the enduring effects of racial violence:

In one sorry blink
the black man killed by the cop
fills the white pavement

The poems in this collection are bursting with questions, from the existential––“whose is the voice demanding I choose life;” “who will stop me / from carelessly setting / the house on fire”––to the mundane. For example, making breakfast, the speaker wonders,

Should I append the cheddar cheese
aged three or is it seven years
that combines so well with the apple?

Should the context include
the conversation with my husband
about the shooter

whose mother had called him
mentally ill    and whose father
had given him the gun?

Every moment is a reminder of the passage of time and of the changes it brings, both in a global sense––“we are not what we were / we will not be what we are”––and on a more personal level, as when the speaker says, of her husband:

he jokes that he will not die
he will grow smaller and smaller

until I can carry him around in a teacup
exhibit him to my friends

Ostriker’s subtle use of humor allows her to address the difficult emotions associated with aging and concomitant physical decline, while also pointing to larger concerns beyond the self, to the interconnectedness of racial violence, global catastrophes, and politics. At the same time, the speaker draws comfort from the world as it is, in all its complexity, inviting the reader to do the same:

May your eyes see the beauty 
and sorrow of the world
clearly and keenly   oh
and may light lead you to love