I grew up as a third-generation atheist-socialist Jew. My religious training consisted of being told that religion was the opiate of the masses. - Alicia Ostriker

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.

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 believe that the most important homage one can pay to the dead is to try to help life prevail: to love the great whirlwind of life, to praise it, to nourish it, never to try to reduce it to something less than life. I hope my writing shows this. When I was pregnant with my first child, I found myself thinking often about the vileness of war in general and the horror of the Holocaust in particular, and wrote the line "whoever has died, I make this child for you." Adorno is exactly wrong, I think: after the Holocaust, one not only can write poetry, one must. Hatred and death are to be fought against with all the strength of one's life-and in my case, that means through art.