I wrote my first poems on pregnancy and childbirth in 1964–’65, based on my first two pregnancies. I was living in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and I f… - Alicia Ostriker

I believe that the flood of writing by eloquent women in our own time will alter the mainstream of American poetry.

only in our own time do we see many women poets having careers in the same sense that men always have, which involves solving problems and moving on to other problems...It is a joy, reading through a woman's work, to watch her grow too large for herself, shed her skin and emerge new.

I became a feminist through poetry. It was instantly clear to me-the more I read the more clear it was, that women's poetry was as revolutionary as anything that had come up the turnpike since early modernism, and that it was a collective noise, sound, chorale of voices that I was hearing. And simultaneously, my critical head was asking: What is happening? What is that collective voice saying that has never been said in the history of poetry? I mean that was very clear. Something's happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you, Honey? But we're all hearing it. It's in the bloodstream, it's in the air. What is it? And that was what produced Stealing the Language.