Favorite books of 2002.

Sometimes I think that since it's almost the end of the world, I should just go ahead and have that cannoli, then smoke that Camel while I read that Danielle Steel. Is there only enough time left for short stories? But what if it's not quite the end of the world? Should I finally read a self-improvement book? Should I color coordinate my reading with the terror palette? Fried Green Tomatoes. Devil in a Blue Dress. The Yellow Wallpaper. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Red Badge of Courage.

This year, I noticed that most of my reading was of the get-me-out-of-here genre. On cross-country flights I risked being so engrossed I wouldn't notice my seatmate's sneaker heels were smoking. The Lovely Bones (Little Brown), by Alice Sebold, was a transcontinental, non-smarmy surprise. Fall on Your Knees (Scribner), by Ann-Marie MacDonald, did the page-turning trick. You've read about Everything Is Illuminated (Houghton Mifflin), by Jonathan Safran Foer, except perhaps for how let-me-read-this-to-you hysterical it is. My seatmate looked at me as if my shoes were smoking.

The Glass Palace (Random House), by Amitav Ghosh, is set primarily in Burma, Malaya, and India from 1885 until the present. The teak industry is a character. The story of Indian soldiers in the condescension of the British army is heartbreaking. The details of the local and international politics are fascinating.

Daughter of Fortune (Harper Perennial), the sixth novel by Isabel Allende, got me across country and back. I did not lower my shades so people could better see episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond. I'd never read any Allende before and was swept up in the big story woven from strands from China, England, Chile, and gold rush California.

(Confession: I never finished more than seventy-five pages of that Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri I recommended last year. Now that I'm living in one, I just can't bear to read more from it in my spare time.)

Kate Clinton is a humorist.

By Ruth Conniff

Chris Hedges, veteran war correspondent for The New York Times and winner of the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism, has written a powerful indictment, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (PublicAffairs).

Hedges writes from the depths of his own near despair, as he tries to recover from a fifteen-year addiction to the adrenalin rush of war reporting: from the killing fields of Central America and Bosnia to the "turkey shoot" of Gulf War Iraq, the refugee camps of Africa and Palestine, and the bombed-out formerly cosmopolitan cities of Sarajevo and Pristina. War and death are his life's work. This book, a long personal essay grappling with the overwhelming darkness he has witnessed, is an existential effort. Courageously and eloquently facing his own worst nature in self-deprecating and sometimes shocking passages, Hedges tackles a timeless human dilemma--the struggle, as he puts it, between the Freudian forces of love and death.

Hedges reviles the lies of nationalism and "self defense," the stupidity and mindlessness of "patriotic" imperatives to kill a dehumanized enemy. He despises the surreal loss of perspective in the wars he has witnessed around the globe, and, he adds, in this country after September 11.

Hedges doesn't spare his colleagues. "The notion that the press was used in the [Gulf] war is incorrect," he writes. "The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort." He is disgusted by a media that "apes slogans and euphemisms," and helps a willing public to distance itself psychologically from the real costs of war waged in our name.

"And yet," he writes, "despite all this, I am not a pacifist.... The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility."

He rooted for swift intervention in Sarajevo and Kosovo. Not out of a romantic sense that the forces of "right" would triumph over the forces of "evil," but merely to stem the murderous crime wave that was engulfing the civilian populace whose suffering he documented so well.

"There are times when force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral," Hedges argues. "We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world's genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not. We stood by and watched the slaughter in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda where a million people died."

This is a most timely book, particularly for readers struggling with the moral ambiguities of an imminent attack on Iraq that is sure to be an overwhelming high-tech assault on civilians, and yet, at the same time, a war against one of the world's most repressive dictatorships.

"This book is not a call to inaction. It is a call to repentance," he writes. Hedges wants us to realize we carry within ourselves, in our warlike ways, "the seeds of our own obliteration." We have to give up our simplistic identification with one side or the other in every armed conflict, and face our morally messy condition.

A profound and tragic meditation, the author's struggle to make sense of his personal experience is a metaphor for our plight as Americans and as human beings gripped by terrible violence we try to rationalize, ignore, or oversimplify with easy answers.

If we are to change our future from one of certain self-annihilation to one of hope, we have to face our own demons, Hedges suggests. This is a necessary first step to fostering real, humane values in place of war's false consciousness. Only then, writes this former seminarian, can we find redemption. May he find that longed-for peace himself. He deserves it.

Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.

Anne-Marie Cusac

In the early 1990s, having heard Cesare Pavese's name in one of my poetry classes, I developed a satisfying obsession. I found a used copy of William Arrowsmith's 1976 translation of the poet's first book, Lavorare Stanca, which Arrowsmith translated as Hard Labor. I carried that book in the bottom of my backpack. As a result, the volume was soon stained, dented, bent, and almost wholly memorized.

The Arrowsmith translation has been out of print for some time, so it is a joy to welcome a new translation by Geoffrey Brock (Copper Canyon). The new Pavese, titled Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950, indudes not only his poems from Lavorare Stanca, but also his later poems, until now unavailable in English.

Lavorare Stanca, translated as Work's Tiring in the Brock edition, does include some personal lyrics, but it is primarily a selection of portraits. Pavese saw ordinary people as worthy of his best attention. His poetry exhibits heightened social conscience, expressed through daily, lived detail and a scrutiny of what economic disappointment does to a life. I found his work refreshing, especially when compared with much current American poetry.

But Pavese's writing was startling in his own day, as well. "When Italian prose was `an extended conversation with itself' and poetry was `a suffered silence,' I was conversing, in both poetry and prose, with peasants, working men and women, sand-diggers, prostitutes, convicts, and kids," Pavese wrote. "I say this with no idea of boasting. I liked those people then, I like them now. They were like me."

Here is a selection from the poem "Deola Thinking," which is in the wonderful new volume:

  Deola passes her mornings sitting
   in a cafe,
   and nobody looks at her. Every
   one's rushing to work,
   under a sun still fresh with the
   dawn. Even Deola
   isn't looking for anyone: she
   smokes serenely, breathing
   the morning. In years past, she
   slept at this hour
   to recover her strength: the throw
   on her bed
   was black with the boot prints of
   soldiers and workers,
   the backbreaking clients. But now,
   on her own,
   it's different: the work's more
   refined, and it's easier.
   Like the gentleman yesterday, who
   woke her up early,
   kissed her, and took her (I'd stay
   awhile, dear,
   in Turin with you, if I could) to the
   station
   to tell him goodbye.
   She's dazed
   this morning, but fresh--
   Deola likes being free, likes drinking
   her milk
   and eating brioches. This morning
   she's nearly a lady,
   and if she looks at anyone now, it's
   just to pass time.

Although he did not recognize his own writing as political until decades later, Pavese soon came to the attention of the government. "In the 1930s Pavese was briefly exiled to Calabria for anti-Fascist activities," notes Mark Rudman in his preface to a new edition of Pavese's powerful novel The Moon and the Bonfires (New York Review of Books). Similarly, in that novel, the narrator, who has been opposing the Fascists, gets a "rough job on a ship leaving for America" shortly after the night that "Cerreti came to warn me that Guido and Remo had been arrested and the police were looking for the others."

Like the early poems, this novel is attentive to social complexity. The narrator, whom Pavese does not name, is an orphan, brought to a poor farm to work. During his childhood, he is hungry, unhealthy, and frequently called "bastard." After a twenty-year stay in the States, he comes back to his village a successful man. "Making a fortune means exactly that, to have gone a great distance and come back like this: rich, big, fat, and free," he observes.

The little village seems still to contain the entire war. And so does the narrator's best friend, Nuto, who is troubled by more than town gossip. He remembers betraying a friend, Santina, the daughter of the narrator's former employer. She is a beautiful woman at a time and place when, Pavese makes clear, women have few options. She uses her beauty and her smarts, sleeping with blackshirts and partisans both, spying on each group for the other, drawn into war's vortex. Soon enough, the partisans kill Santina, Nuto witnesses the assassination, and chooses not to help her.

In the book's closing lines, the narrator wonders whether the Earth will heave up Santina's body as it has those of other fascists. "No, not Santa," answers Nuto. "They won't find her. You can't cover a woman like that with dirt and just leave her. Too many men still drooled at the thought of her. Baracca [the partisan leader] took care. He had us cut all the dry branches we could find in the vineyard and cover her over. Then we poured gasoline on her and lit it. By noon it was all ash. The mark was still there last year, like the bed of a bonfire."

Anne-Marie Cusac is Managing Editor of The Progressive.

Elizabeth DiNovella

A friend has ignited in me a new passion for comic books and graphic novels that take on complex issues of global proportions--war, racism, exile--or the intimate details of childhood memories, such as the agony of being bullied or the bewildering loss of a friend. 2002 produced several illustrated works that deserve a closer look. (Art from these works is excerpted in these reviews.)

In her "autobifictionalography" One Hundred Demons (Sasquatch Books), Lynda Barry presents ink brush and watercolor drawings that tell stories ranging from "Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend," to "The Election," a hilarious story about Barry's compulsive TV watching during the 2000 Presidential election saga.

Barry's first book in color, One Hundred Demons is beautiful and tender. Many of the seventeen chapters are based on painful memories of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. Love, hate, sex, drugs, and family are all here and examined in comic-strip style. But this reminiscing is complicated: "Which is worse? Girlness that was insisted upon or girlness that was forbidden? Frilly clothes you couldn't play in or ratty clothes you were ashamed of?"

Blood Song (Harcourt), Eric Drooker's latest graphic novel, takes us on a journey from an island paradise to a modern metropolis. Using only images, he spins a beautiful fairy tale reminding us of our shared humanity.

A young woman's odyssey begins when she flees her edenic home after a military invasion. She ends up in exile in a foreign city, where again she finds brutality but also a new love.

In a visually stunning way, Drooker confines his color palette almost entirely to black and blue; the use of watercolor, on scratchboard engravings gives the novel a soft light. Dashes of brilliant color--the red of blood, the yellow of a song--add depth to the novel. The effect is a beautifully surreal, timeless landscape. Some of the details, though, place us in contemporary society: video cameras survey the street corner while corporate logos clutter the city.

Ted Rall's graphic travelogue To Afghanistan and Back (NBM) chronicles his strange trip to Central Asia in November-December 2001.

To Afghanistan and Back, which The Progressive excerpted in May, is unsettling, though I found the details of the monetary costs of covering the war fascinating: Did ABC really pay locals $800 for a twenty-kilometer ride? Rall outlines the sheer lunacy of "war tourist" journalism: the fear, the boredom, the skin rashes, the flea-infested rugs. After three weeks in Afghanistan, he realizes that the war is just a cynical game, and nothing like what we see on TV.

Rall can be distractingly conspiratorial at times, but the glimpses into the daily life of war-torn Afghanistan are invaluable in understanding the chaos of Operation Enduring Freedom.

Rall also edited Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists (NBM). These cartoonists may not be found regularly on the editorial pages of daily newspapers, but they crop up in the alternative weeklies. Rall showcases and interviews twenty-one cartoonists, from Tom Tomorrow to Lalo Alcaraz. The differences in style are surprising, and I am happy to see that satire is alive.

Operation Enduring Freedom sparked Get Your War On (Soft Skull), David Rees's compilation of his acerbic, profane, and hilarious comic strip of the same name. Temp-worker Rees posted his cartoon on the Internet two days after the start of the bombing campaign in Afghanistan and got millions of hits within weeks. He clearly touched a nerve.

Rees's clip-art characters make Tom Tomorrow's comics look flashy. Nameless office workers share their anxieties and cynicism about the war on terrorism, the collapse of the economy, anthrax, and religion. One example: "You know who I've come to like in all this? John Ashcroft. That guy just gives me a good feeling! ... Good God these are some powerful antidepressants I'm taking! Wow!!!" (Rees's comics can be seen at getyourwaron.com.)

Comic book fans should also check out Jim Mahfood's Stupid Comics (Image Comics). Twenty-something Mahfood provides graphic commentary on the issues and absurdities of our times. The beef industry, the loss of privacy, and obnoxious cell phone users are the targets of his pen-and-ink drawings and wicked sarcasm. Mahfood also created the excellent comic book Grrl Scouts. (His work can be seen on-line at www.40ozcomics.com.)

Other noteworthy comics: a reissue of the award-winning comic book series Palestine (Fantagraphics Books) by journalist Joe Sacco. This book collects all nine issues of Palestine into one volume. Originally written and drawn from his travels ten years ago during the first intifada, Sacco's disturbing comics are worth looking at as the second intifada rages on. Fantagraphics Books also published volume two of King, Ho Che Anderson's interpretive biography of Martin Luther King Jr. And Jessica Abel's La Perdida crosses borders and languages as it tells the story of a young American woman who falls in love with Mexico.

Despite my picks, I am not a comic book geek (yet). But I have a new appreciation for the power of graphic novels and cartoons.

Elizabeth DiNovella is Associate Editor of The Progressive.

Andrea Lewis

The Whole World's Watching: Peace and Social Justice Movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Berkeley Art Center Association) is documentary photography and historic reflection masquerading as an art exhibition catalog. More than that, it is a powerful reminder in tense times that "we've been here before."

Originally published in conjunction with a fall 2001 exhibition mounted by the Berkeley Art Center, The Whole World's Watching presents more than fifty striking images from every corner of the counterculture revolution.

Surrounding the duotone photographs are the words of writers and activists who participated in the movements and the times. Scholar and historian Clark C. Smith writes of the "Bay Area and the Vietnam War"; photographers Michelle Vignes and Jeffrey Blankfort show us the view "At the Induction Center" and during "Stop the Draft Week" in Oakland, circa 1968; Clayborne Carson, director of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, Stanford University, writes of the civil rights movement as part of California history; Douglas Wachter captures U.C.-Berkeley students picketing a local Woolworth's in 1960 to support the lunch-counter sit-ins in the South. Feminist historian Ruth Rosen, now a San Francisco Chronicle editorial writer, defines the unheralded beginnings of the women's liberation movement. Cathy Cade takes a look at TWA stewardesses on strike in San Francisco in 1973. And Richard Bermack gives us glimpses of happy women carpenters building a cultural center in San Francisco in 1976.

"Through their participation in the civil rights, free speech, student, and anti-war movements, [women activists] gradually came to understand that they had not even begun to name the secrets that shaped women's lives," Rosen writes.

Photographer Nacio Jan Brown makes an especially impressive showing, freeze-framing memorable images from (among others) a Berkeley anti-Vietnam war rally in the late 1960s, the Third World Strike Rally at San Francisco State in 1969, and the release of Black Panther Huey Newton from prison in Oakland in 1970. Additional contributors to the volume include Peter Coyote, Alice Hamburg, Harold Adler, Ken Light, Ted Streshinsky, and Robert Hsiang, among many others.

While the Bay Area focus of The Whole World's Watching is geographically limiting, just about every conceivable political movement of the time is discussed and photographed, including disability rights, Native American activism, queer liberation, environmentalism, the rise of Latino power, free speech, and much more. You don't have to be a Californiaphile to be awed by the depth and breadth of political activity coming out of the three major Bay Area cities in the '60s and '70s.

While video documents allow us to look back at history and feel the flow of events, still photographs allow us to fix our gaze, go inside a moment in time, and consider what we see in detail, unhurried and without the need for a rewind button. These photographs compel us to study the faces, the eyes, the action, the style, and the energy of a particular demonstration and consider its place in history.

As current U.S. military actions and civil rights restrictions continue to gather force, historical reflection is just what's called for. So, too, the kind of activism memorialized here.

Andrea Lewis is a San Francisco-based writer and co-host of the Morning Show on KPFA in Berkeley, California.

Fred McKissack Jr.

My introduction to George Orwell was like that of so many other American teenagers: reading 1984 for a high school English class.

I identified with Winston Smith: The protagonist wanted to be independent, and so did I. My understanding of Orwell was shaped from the mini-bio of his life in the book. Sectarian lefties in college told me to dismiss the man and .his books as a charlatan, homophobe, racist, and anti-Semite. Despite fighting on the good side during the Spanish Civil War, despite his repudiation of colonialism and totalitarianism, despite his defense of nonwhite writers from Bombay to New York, despite his sharp wit and his good heart, Orwell just wasn't left enough.

I should've known better. No, I should've studied him on my own.

So, thank you Christopher Hitchens for doing the leg work and brainy analysis in Why Orwell Matters (Basic Books). It's a reasoned, robust rereading of a complex man and his work, but I doubt this will lead to a rapprochement between Orwell and his critics. There Mil be folks on the left side of the aisle who will dismiss the book because Hitchens no longer sings out of the same hymnal as Alex and Katha, but that's just plain foolish. Hitchens builds a solid case for why Orwell is one of the most important dead white men of the last century. Hitchens's defense is detailed, and he avoids squishy feelings and purple prose.

The two best chapters come early: "Orwell and the Left" and "Orwell and the Right." Hitchens upbraids lefty critics for their misguided critiques, with some hefty body shots thrown at Raymond Williams, an early pioneer of cultural studies at Cambridge, whom he casts as a jealous hack. He breaks down Williams's evaluations of Orwell, exposes the inaccurate scholarship, and explodes the soft analysis.

The acolytes of the right did him no better, reducing Orwell's complexities to simple-minded perversions of his beliefs. I really enjoyed Hitchens's roundhouse to Norman Podhoretz's 1984 essay for Harper's magazine, "If Orwell Were Alive Today."

"I was fascinated by this essay, for two reasons," Hitchens writes. "First, it admired Orwell mainly for his shortcomings (citing with approval his ill-natured remarks on homosexuals, for instance, though not his occasional lapses about Jews). Second, it was incapable of quoting him accurately, let alone fairly. Just like Raymond Williams, Podhoretz was not above taking a remark made by Orwell in the second person and rendering it in the first person."

Podhoretz plops into Orwell's mouth a quote about dropping two bombs on the mother of your enemy if he drops a bomb on your mother's home. (Note: Why is it when street thugs take this approach to problem solving we call it barbarism, but when nations do it we refer to it as realpolitik?)

"I happened to be the person chosen by the editors of the magazine to reply," Hitchens writes, "and I observed of this distortion that it would be fun to read Podhoretz's review of Swift's Modest Proposal, replete no doubt with rich approval of the stewing of Irish babies."

Damn, that's so funny it's Orwellian.

Fred McKissack Jr. is Culture Editor of The Progressive.

John Nichols

With the dismal result of November's election, expect a stack of books to be penned about the disconnect between Democrats and the white working class. But none will say as much of consequence as a book that--in describing the circumstances surrounding the recording of Billy Cox's New Deal-era song "The Democratic Donkey's in His Stall Again," and a thousand other politically relevant country music tracks--offers more insight than a shelf of standard political tomes.

Music historian Bill C. Malone's Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class (University of Illinois) is so rich in detail and analysis that it ought to be required reading for anyone who feigns an interest in those vast stretches of America known as "fly-over country." This book digs deep into issues of race, class, and political reaction as they are raised and illuminated by country music. Pick an issue and Malone will find a country song that addressed it: From the Sons of the Pioneers' "Old Man Atom," a Cold War-era call for international cooperation, to Cactus Pryor's "Point of Order," a spoof of Joe McCarthy recorded in the days when most artists were afraid to take on the red-baiting Senator.

There is nothing sentimental about Malone's examination of country music and its role in the national discourse; he details the ugly racism of songs recorded for the old Reb-Time label, as well as the creepy nationalism of Vietnam-era songs like "The Battle Hymn of Lt. William Calley." But he also recognizes the nuances in Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee," and he points readers toward a rich vein of working class populism--some rough-hewn, some remarkably sophisticated--in the country section.

"For every Garth Brooks, there are a thousand country musicians who perform in local bars, taverns, and American Legion halls and who have never been able to give up their day jobs," writes Malone. "These are the musicians whose middle class dreams are tempered by working class realities."

Malone's regard for these performers and for those working class realities make him the Howard Zinn of country music historians.

A more focused examination of a single artist's life and music, Michele Kort's Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro (St. Martin's) is in its own way as instructive and valuable as Malone's text. Soul Picnic, the first biography of the enormously influential writer of songs that slipped feminist, civil rights, and anti-war messages into the pop mainstream, is an exceptionally important examination not just of Nyro but of the struggle of the independent woman artist in an increasingly commercial music industry. Kort argues, specifically, that Nyro is owed a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. And Kort's exceptionally well-done book makes the broader case that songs such as "Save the Country"--a brilliant 1968 call for peace and social justice that Nyro described as "my philosophy in a nutshell"--remain essential in a world that has yet to heed the songwriter's advice to "study war no more."

John Nichols is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of "Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media" (Seven Stories Press).

Matthew Rothschild

After the crash of the stock market, James K. Glassman, co-author of Dow 36,000, was asked about his rosy prediction. His response: I said it would get to 36,000, I just didn't say when.

What brings that to mind is The Emerging Democratic Majority, by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira (Scribner). This emergence does not appear imminent, given the debacle of November 5. But Judis and Teixeira say the steam has gone out of the far right, and that the McGovernites actually have won the debate on social libertarianism--feminism, abortion, gay rights--among members of an increasingly powerful professional class. They contend that when the economy turns downward, the Democrats can make gains among the white working class with populist appeals. And they insist that the rising proportion of minorities, professionals, and single women bodes well.

Warning: The authors' terminology can be cloying. Bad enough that they talk about "postindustrial metropolises," but then to dub them as "ideopolises" is to strain the reader's (or at least this reader's!) patience. And the book bugs me for political reasons, as well. It all too readily criticizes Democrats for promoting universal health care, and it praises Clinton and Gore for adopting Republican-style "fiscal constraint," which the authors say appealed to the professional class. Plus, it dismisses, almost out of hand, any validity to Ralph Nader's challenge.

Still, for those who woke up on November 6 with an awful headache, take this book as an aspirin--or at least a placebo.

In this year of corporate malfeasance, one book stands out: High and Mighty: SUVs--the World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, by Keith Bradsher (PublicAffairs). The author, former Detroit bureau chief for The New York Times, explains how the automakers circumvented clean air and safety standards by classifying SUVs as light trucks instead of passenger cars. The prevalence of these dangerous vehicles is causing "close to 3,000 needless deaths a year in the United States," he writes.

Bradsher spares no one, not the auto companies, which consistently dodged regulations and successfully strong-armed Congress; not the United Auto Workers, which played an instrumental role in helping to lobby legislators; not the government regulators, who got outfoxed time and time again; and not the environmental groups, which oddly did not awaken to the hazards of SUVs until just a few years ago.

Given his perch at the Times, Bradsher got unparalleled access to senior auto executives and engineers, who spoke to him with amazing frankness. "The only time those SUVs are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3:00 a.m.," J. C. Collins, Ford's top marketing manager for SUVs and minivans, told Bradsher.

Gerald Meyers, vice president of vehicle development at American Motors at the time of the Kaiser Jeep, now refers to himself as Dr. Frankenstein, Bradsher reports. After Meyers and other auto execs got their way in Washington, they were exultant. "We didn't have to worry about fuel economy much at all, we didn't have to worry about bumper height standards, we didn't have to worry about side-impact standards, we didn't have to worry about emission standards," Meyers told Bradsher. "So you see, it was a dream for us."

That dream has turned into a "public policy disaster," Bradsher writes. And it's a disaster, he warns, that is only going to get worse in the years to come unless regulators, consumers, or trial lawyers stop the automakers in their tracks.

Every year, I try to recommend a book of poetry, and this year I've found a great one: Alicia Suskin Ostriker's the volcano sequence (University of Pittsburgh).

A mature, philosophical, yet playful voice comes through in these tight poems that revolve around two themes: Ostriker's endless wrestling match with God, and her poignant embrace of her mother, now ill.

Her ambivalence toward God is on almost every page: "listen you are the hope of my heart / quarrel of my art," she says in one poem, and, in another: "you are the wild driver of my vehicle / the argument in my poem." At times, she refers to God as "the absent mathematician," but when she appreciates the natural world, she chides herself for bemoaning God's absence: "You have done enough, engineer / how dare we ask you for justice."

But she is far too wise to let God off the hook so easily.

Her argument is not only the obvious one that God (for all you believers out there) allows so much suffering and injustice, but that human beings emulate the wrathfulness and cruelty that God exhibits in the Bible: "No wonder imams cut hands off sinners / no wonder the Jewish lunatic murders worshipers / in a place of reconciliation."

In her more personal poems, she contends with what it means to "honor your mother" while fleeing her, even "despising" her early on:

  unasked for disappointing hateful
   life
   it is the mother's fault

   [...]

   what a pity she does not eat us
   and be done with it

Her mother, who appears to have Alzheimer's and to be in a nursing home, represents a challenge. But Ostriker is up to it at the end:

  I saved your writing even the scraps
   I saved the letters praising you as a
   teacher
   today you have wet yourself you
   have soiled your underpants
   I embrace you when I arrive and
   when I leave.

Intense and profound, these poems also dazzle with surprising imagery: "Their words fall like spilled face powder," or, in describing people sitting in a cinema, "we are coiled here in utero / like pears in syrup."

Now that's poetry!

Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive.