Scattered at Sea
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling new collection from an award-winning poet--longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry
Amy Gerstler has won acclaim for sly, sophisticated, and subversive poems that find meaning in unexpected places. The title of her new collection, Scattered at Sea, evokes notions of dispersion, diaspora, sowing one’s wild oats, having one’s mind expanded or blown, losing one’s wits, and mortality. Making use of dramatic monologue, elegy, humor, and collage, these poems explore hedonism, gender, ancestry, reincarnation, bereavement, and the nature of prayer. Groping for an inclusive, imaginative, postmodern spirituality, they draw from an array of sources, including the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, diagnostic tests for Alzheimer’s disease, 1950s recipes, the Babylonian Talmud, and Walter Benjamin’s writing on his drug experiences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gerstler (Dearest Creature), winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Bitter Angel, once again brilliantly amplifies the natural world in this blisteringly humorous 11th collection. Never shy, the poems zip between black comedy and earthy odes: "Regret clogs arteries. We stuff ourselves// with bread and sex. Then ash provides/ the most natural last transport// imaginable." Each of the book's five sections presents new speculations, references, and philosophies a section titled "Womanish" provides distinctive gender commentary by cross-hatching social norms with absurdities: "A man's sweat can get you pregnant. Beware./ Women have been fertilized by animal bites, dreams,/ swallowing insects, seawater, eating beans." Gerstler's dextrous poems work as satire as well as truthful reflections of humanness, often beautifully crushing in their honesty: "what shall remain/ of the hand-me-down earth/ for the meek to claim/ when lovers of blood sport/ have finished with it/ only a welling up/ of that last gasp: vapors of vapors." What is most compelling is Gerstler's dynamic consideration of spirituality, afterworlds, and reincarnations dense subjects spellbound with unexpected brevity: "In one life I was a monk who won a newborn in a bet/ In this life Lord knows what is to happen yet." Gerstler's latest proves to be delightful, surreal and well-rounded book.
