Extends the feminist examination of western literature to the founding document of patriarchal culture, the Bible. At the same time, it re-thinks certain customary assumptions about feminism and about the Bible, in the light of poetic 'readings' of Biblical texts by 19th and 20th century women writers. It proposes that women writers relate to the Bible in complex ways which both critique biblical misogyny and stem directly from elements of transgressive writing within the Biblical text, suggesting that feminist reinterpretations of the Bible constitute an inevitable consequence of radical spiritual values at the core of scripture itself.

"'If we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly as we think, ' as Woolf puts it in A Room of One's Own , writing like a woman simply means writing like what one actually is, in sickness and health, richer and poorer, belly and bowels, the consonants and the vowels too. We may have a general sense that women poets are more likely than men, at the present time, to write in detail about their bodies; to take power relationships as a theme; to want to speak with a strong rather than a subdued voice; are less likely to seek distance, more likely to seek intimacy, in poetic tone. But generalization would be foolish here. 'Woman poet, ' like 'American poet' or 'French poet' or 'Russian poet, ' allows--even insists on--diversity, while implying something valuable in common, some shared language and life, of tremendous importance to the poet and the poet's readers." --Alicia Ostriker

Like much twentieth-century feminist writing today, this book crosses the boundaries of genre. Biblical interpretation combines with fantasy, autobiography, and poetry. Politics joins with eroticism. Irreverence coexists with a yearning for the sacred. Scholarship contends with heresy. Most excitingly, the author continues and extends the tradition of arguing with God that commences in the Bible itself and continues now, as it has for centuries, to animate Jewish writing. The difference here is that the voice that debates with God is a woman's.

In this selection of poems from thirty years of a distinguished writing career, we see the growth of a poet’s mind, heart, and spirit as Ostriker struggles to love “this wounded / World that we cannot heal, that is our bride.” Whether she probes the meaning of childhood, family, marriage, and motherhood, or art, history, politics, and God; whether she is celebrating sexuality or confronting mortality, the poet includes “whatever I can grasp of human experience within my art—the good and beautiful, the evil and chaotic. I tell my students that they must write what they are afraid to write; and I attempt to do so myself.”

Alicia Suskin Ostriker's voice has long been acknowledged as a major force in American poetry. In No Heaven, her eleventh collection, she takes a hint from John Lennon's "Imagine" to wrestle with the world as it is: "no hell below us, / above us only sky." It is a world of cities, including New York, London, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where the poet can celebrate pickup basketball, peace marches, and the energy of graffiti. It is also a world of families, generations coming and going, of love, love affairs, and friendship. Then it is a world full of art and music, of Rembrandt and Bonnard, Mozart and Brahms. Finally, it is a world haunted by violence and war. No Heaven rises to a climax with elegies for Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli zealot, and for the poet's mother, whose death is experienced in the context of a post-9/11 impulse to destroy that seems to seduce whole nations. Yet Ostriker's ultimate stance is to "Try to praise the mutilated world," as the poet Adam Zagajewski has counseled. At times lyric, at times satiric, Ostriker steadfastly pursuesin No Heaven her poetics of ardor, a passion for the here and now that has chastened and consoled her many devoted readers.

Quoting King Solomon's famous prayer to God at the Temple in Jerusalem, "Behold, the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded," Alicia Suskin Ostriker posits a God who cannot be contained by dogma and doctrine. Troubled by the way the Bible has become identified in our culture with a monolithic authoritarianism, Ostriker focuses instead on the extraordinary variability of Biblical writing. For the Love of God is a provocative and inspiring re-interpretation of six essential Biblical texts: The Song of Songs, the Book of Ruth, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Jonah, and Job. In prose that is personal and probing, analytically acute and compellingly readable, Ostriker sees these writings as "counter-texts," deviating from convention yet deepening and enriching the Bible, our images of God, and our own potential spiritual lives. Attempting to understand "some of the wildest, strangest, most splendid writing in Western tradition," she shows how the Bible embraces sexuality and skepticism, boundary crossing and challenges to authority, how it illuminates the human psyche and mirrors our own violent times, and how it asks us to make difficult choices in the quest for justice. For better or worse, our society is wedded to the Bible. But according to Talmud, "There is always another interpretation." Ostriker demonstrates that the Bible, unlike its reputation, offers a plenitude of surprises.