The Cold War

Ossip's long-awaited second book is a surprising poetic powerhouse that interweaves the personal and the political in ways that are as aesthetically exciting as they are emotionally rich...Ossip deftly mixes linguistic registers in poems that blend aspects of confessional writing, social and literary criticism, and history. ... Ossip is about to take the poetry world off guard with what is surely among the most various, powerful, and representative (of post-terror America) poetry collections of the past few years. 

—Publishers Weekly

The biggest surprise in poetry for 2011 is this second book by Kathleen Ossip. It’s got everything one could wish for in a new collection of poems. . . . It’s just beautiful. And terrifying. 

—Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2011 

The poet has an uncanny ability to convey what it actually feels like to be alive today...Ossip is one of our foremost ethnographers of contemporary unreality. 

—The Believer

Ossip conjures delightful and unexpected muses...shrewd and ambitious. 

—Dana Jennings, New York Times 

Ossip's anxious excitable congeries of feelings—about freedom and happiness, about girlhood, womanhood, sex and domestic life, about terror, security, and peace—arise from her regard for extensive social systems....Ossip's poems have the fluidity of gossip... 

—Stephanie Burt, The Nation