The Holy & Broken Bliss by Alicia Ostriker

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          Alicia Ostriker’s The Holy & Broken Bliss is, essentially, a poetic time capsule. Capturing America’s tumultuous battle with Covid-19 as well as the rollercoaster ride known as the first Trump Presidency, Ostriker’s poems do not shy away from examining America’s bad, worst, and extremely ugly. However, the poems in The Holy & Broken Bliss prove that even amid seemingly insurmountable chaos, balance is key. Ostriker’s poems embrace minimalist forms and structures and rely on simple, modest language and images to form prayer-like verses that transcend the page. Amidst a violent, chaotic, national, socio-political crisis and pandemic, the speaker manages to find peaceful, affirming moments despite the cultural and biological decay occurring around them.
          Of course, if anything, The Holy & Broken Bliss is a meditation on the precarious balance between life and death. A number of poems reflect on the spiritual aspect of this balance, while others depict daily life with chronic health issues such as tachycardia, mobility impairment, and mental decline. “We All Know” is one of the collection’s initial poems, introducing the life-death-afterlife cycle in an accessible, no-frills manner. The speaker asserts that an individual knows the hour of their death, as well as the meaning of their life. However, the road one travels towards this insight and these intuitions is not simply marked. It is lined with “the monsters” and “the joy-embracing gods,” and then, finally, “the dust.” The phrase “the dust” concludes the poem, producing a sense of finality, acting as an allusion to the Bible’s Genesis 3:19, in which—according to the Judeo-Christian tradition—God tells Adam and Eve that they will return to the dust from which they were made. For some, the phrase might even conjure a sense of hopelessness, the bluntness and brevity of the line serving as a keen reminder that death—in whatever form it takes— is the one outcome universally shared.
          The Covid-19 pandemic’s ravages and life-altering outcomes permeate Ostriker’s poems, and while the pandemic’s terror and uncertainty center many of them, the “Plague Time Ritual” series attempts to balance the day-to-day unpredictability and fear with small comforts. Most notably, “Plague Time Ritual II,” with its longing for understanding and personal, even national, renewal, shines. The speaker depicts the “daily wipe” of “each piece of mail / with Clorox.” However, the act of disinfecting the mail holds a deeper significance for the speaker. The speaker asserts:

          I wish I could wipe myself clean
          of envy
          of anger
          symptoms of another lifelong
          contagious illness.

The speaker’s longing for renewal is passionate, emphatic—made even more so because of the shortened lines that place emphasis on the phrases “of envy” and “of anger.” The speaker continues, stating they do not “believe in original sin” and wondering “so what in hell / is it / infecting me year after year.” The lack of punctuation within the lines and at the ends of stanzas creates a smoothness, a fluidity, and each line collapses into another. The linguistic twist occurs in the poem’s final two lines: “how cleanse / how heal.” The space replaces the preposition “to,” essentially adding to and reiterating the speaker’s confusion at the world, but, most of all, at themself.
          “All That Year” depicts a broiling, turmoil-laden America. The speaker evokes a collective “We” that bodysurfs “a wave of public venom” unleashed by a “swaggering leader” who “loosed lies from his lips like eels.” The speaker notes that this specific time was “a good moment for cartoonists and journalists / and billionaires and lovers of guns.” Nonetheless, the speaker also provides another reminder—that such moments are “a good moment // for poets” because “poets thrive on disaster” since they are born “within the wound.” Thus, “All That Year” attests to poetry’s necessity amid disasters and upheavals—a sentiment that implicitly echoes in 2025 as poets like Fady Joudah, Zeina Azzam, Serhiy Zhadan, Artur Dron, and many others utilize poetry as a preservation mechanism for the wars in their respective homelands.
          “Prayer to the Shekinah” is a passionate and fervent plea to God’s divine presence, its mysticism and majesty formed by its lack of capitalization and the lack of punctuation. The speaker’s address to the mysterious “you” reinforces the mysticism:

          since I do not know how to reach you
          by myself in the carapace of this body
          struggling like the turtle
          to move as fast as I can
          and not get run over crossing the street.

The speaker’s identification with the turtle is also powerful, since it signifies that the speaker does not see themself as greater than or better than the turtle, but rather, in creation’s—and the creator’s—scheme, all living things have meaning.
          The Holy & Broken Bliss is prophetic and filled with yearning. And for a world rooted in greed, violence, and inhumanity, these are needed spaces for peace and respite—a true salvation.