An essay is my way of pursuing an elusive intuition into the forest of what I cannot yet understand. - Alicia Ostriker

No writer should be without writing cohorts. You go mad. Even Emily Dickinson, famous for weaving a web of solitude round herself, had numerous literary friendships.

I write as a poet for a general audience, I write as a woman, I write as a Jew, and there are communities of readers for whom these identities are deeply important. Still, I never permanently shake the old sorrow of feeling in some way essentially isolated. I suppose it goes with the territory of any creative life.

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 found myself thinking, why don’t I have any models, where are the poems about pregnancy and childbirth? I realized finally that it was taboo, and that you’re not aware that your taboos are taboos until they’re broken.