Amy Gerstler

Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction, and journalism. Her ten previous poetry collections include Bitter Angel, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Dearest Creature, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Amy Gerstler’s new collection, Scattered at Sea (Penguin Books) evokes notions of dispersion, diaspora, sowing wild oats, minds, and mortality. Using 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, Gerstler draws from an array of sources, including the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, 1950s recipes, the Babylonian Talmud, and Walter Benjamin’s writing on his drug experiences. The Washington Post compared Scattered at Sea with “a wave that knocks you over and changes how you view the world. . .[It] mixes salty humor, invigorating rhythms and sharp-edged wisdom.”