Reviews

The Mother/Child Papers: With a New Preface by the Author by Alicia Ostriker

shanviolinlove's review

5.0

Upon the recommendation of a friend/fellow poet, I checked out Ostriker's The Mother/Child Papers. In these poems, reading sometimes as quiet reflections and other times almost as diary entries, Ostriker comments on the incomparable joy, passion, and pain that is motherhood. She also portrays the intimate bond between flesh, the tender moments of nurturing and playing coupled jarringly with the violence of the times (these poems, as outlined in "Cambodia," were written during the upheaval of the Vietnam War and the bombing at Kent State), the child a mother births and cares for being enticed to war (the running motif of the kneeling guard).