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.