Scattered at Sea Paperback by Amy Gerstler

Product Details

• Publisher: Penguin Books (2015-05-26)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 96 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780143126898
• Item Weight: 136.08 grams
• Dimensions: 9.0 x 5.9 x 0.3 cm

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.

About the Author

AMY GERSTLER is a writer of poetry, nonfiction, and journalism who lives in Los Angeles. 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.