Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s Feminist Poetics: Reading Biblical Poetry as Countertheology

Abstract: Alicia Suskin Ostriker is the author of a wide range of literary and critical works, including several books of poetry and criticism of English-language poetry. This article argues that Ostriker’s work as a poet and literary scholar informs her engagement with biblical literature, particularly biblical poetry. In her formative work on twentieth-century English-language women’s poetry, she articulates how women’s poetry voices embodied identities and creates spaces of intimacy that can break down ideologically constructed barriers. Her creative, poetic biblical criticism mutually informs her interest in the ability of women’s poetry to transform and revise male-dominated mythologies. For Ostriker, the poetry of the Bible provides a resource located within Jewish tradition that can transform it from the inside. As a reader and creative inheritor of the literary heritage of the Bible who is carefully attuned to its literary power, Ostriker’s work reading and revisioning the Bible creates a feminist countertheology grounded in the aesthetic, material possibilities of poetic language.