Wednesday, April 9, 2025

It must have been around 35 years ago that I found myself standing in a grocery line in Century City, California, waiting to pay for the salad I had assembled for my dinner at my job as a typesetter at Radio & Records newspaper. I worked for weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1995, so the exact year is a blur, but I distinctly remember thumbing through an issue of Time magazine as I waited and seeing an article on astrophysics. Suddenly, my eye halted at the name of an astronomer quoted in the article: Jeremy Ostriker. I had never met him, but I had not only met his spouse, but had published one of her books of poetry. Of the two dozen books of poetry I published as the editor of Momentum Press, Alicia Ostriker’s THE MOTHER/CHILD PAPERS is easily one of the four books I am most proud of. It is, in fact, still in print! Beacon Press was the second publisher, and the University of Pittsburgh remains its third publisher.

I had met Alicia because of Jeremy’s work as an astrophysicist. He had been awarded a position at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena in the late 1970s, and Alicia took advantage of her residence in Los Angeles to visit the Beyond Baroque workshop in Venice. Jim Krusoe immediately liked her work and told her to submit some work to Momentum magazine. After Jerry and she returned to New Jersey, I continued our correspondence, during which she told me about struggling to finish a manuscript. “Finish it,” I said, “and I will publish it.” With that promise in mind, she set to work, and in 1980 I fulfilled that promise, bringing out THE MOTHER/CHILD PAPERS the same year that I published books by Len Roberts, who lived in Pennsylvania, and Bob Warden, a doctor who lived in Riverside, California.

I am thinking of Alicia right now because I just read the news that Jeremy has died. The last time I saw Alicia, at a conference in the Pacific Northwest, I learned that Jeremy was slowly growing frail, though he was still very active intellectually. The obituary in The New York Times mentions how he stayed engaged with his younger colleagues in astrophysics even as he was eventually confined to bed.

That Alicia and he had found each other when they were both young seems to me one of the miracles that interrupt the all too often tragic jumble of human life. “Love,” in all its confounding paradoxes, enabled them to flourish as individuals, or so it seemed to me from the distance in which I only saw the “sun” of the poet in the galaxy of their marriage and not the “sun” of the astrophysicist. My own life has been so much more turbulent in love’s oscillations that to see a couple like them was reassuring in that it reminded me that I was the anomaly in love’s wheel of constancy and mutability.

I send Alicia my most profound condolences.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/science/space/jeremiah-ostriker-dead.html

Jeremiah Ostriker, Who Plumbed Dark Forces That Shape Universe, Dies at 87
There’s more to the universe than meets the eye, he found. His studies led astronomy to the dark side, changing our view of what’s out there.