Review by Booklist Review
Rooted in intricate sources, Gerstler's poems leaf and flower with buoyancy and mischief. The first poem, "When I was a bird," signals the poet's delight in shape-shifting. For Gerstler, wild nature is a vast theater of wonders and mysteries, while human nature is a welter of memories, desire, regrets, and confusion. Her funny and arresting poems explore these meshing realms with cascading sensory detail as she offers hilarious variations on constellations and considers the Bride of Frankenstein, Woodstock, Spotify, a spirit phone, and "the celestial realm / more like some cut-rate detox program / than an ultimate reward." Another wildly imagined afterlife underlies "Siren Island (a ten-minute play)." Prose poems recount moments of comeuppance and pratfalls, age and longing. Gerstler revels in startling juxtapositions as in "My Witch:" "She's a chainsaw ingenue / who rents an attic room twenty thousand leagues under the sea." Irreverence and empathy merge in "Schmaltz Alert," a complexly affecting musing on the traumas of pogrom-fleeing Russian Jews, their American progeny, and a shared "ability to simultaneously mock / and embrace the excessively sentimental." Frolicsome and resonant.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This spirited volume is filled with surprises that only Gerstler (Index of Women) could conceive of. In "Finding Your Voice," she drops what might be the world's weirdest yet most precisely accurate simile: "Tonight, your mind's shy as an otter drying a saint's feet with her fur." The next line shifts to the larger question the collection explores: "Is the dilemma not having a self, or possessing too many?" Gerstler's poems may be filled with shifting forms, but they are deeply grounded in human desire, longing, loss, and the things that make humans the tender beings they are. "I regret not wanting what I'm supposed to want," she writes in "Leniency Letter," offering a list of mistakes and wrongdoings. And yet, there's pleasure in not wanting what one is supposed to want, as Gerstler suggests in these confessions. At the end of "Leniency Letter," she inquires, "Are we square now? Can I go?" The speaker does not feel remorse for being a singular, flawed being--and neither should the reader. "Don't let your hearts get lost in the sauce/ as forests go velvet with moss," she warns in one of her sonnets that masterfully plays with sound. Readers will be delighted and entranced. (Apr.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In her follow up to 2021's Index of Women, award-winning Gerstler takes on aging, death, metamorphosis, and the mystery of sound and music in her signature voice, both accessible and keenly observant. The book is organized into five sections that share loose thematic connections and play with form and voice. At the midpoint of the collection is "Siren Island," fashioned as a 10-minute play filled with a cast of loosely recognizable characters trying to orient themselves to a strange afterlife after dying by a variety of self-inflicted means. It is a surprising and effective contrast to the earlier material in the collection. The twin specters of aging and grief appear repeatedly in the poems, sometimes for comedic effect, other times in a tender, elegiac way, as in "For E." Poems in the voice of Satan and Frankenstein's monster, as well as irreverent monologues from deep within the pandemic lockdown ("The Cure," "Downsizing") highlight Gerstler's ability to inhabit different voices and tones. VERDICT A must for any contemporary poetry collection, reflecting the dizzying confusion of aging and avoiding plague in the modern era.--Rebecca Brody
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
