Is This My Final Form?

Is This My Final Form?

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April 1, 2025 | ISBN 9798217021642

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About the Book

A poet renowned for her “wit and complexity” (Poetry Foundation) explores the endless evolution and malleability of life on earth in her most curious, inventive collection to date

Aren’t we all shape-shifters? Is any animal, vegetable, or mineral—even a commonplace object—what it seems to be at any given moment? Who isn’t juggling constant transformations, conflicting roles, changing loyalties, loves, perceptions, and selves, all while being pummeled by shifting devotions, emotions, and obsessions? Do even the dead continue to evolve in surprising ways?

Reveling in these questions, Gerstler’s latest protean poetry collection includes loose sonnets, shapely praise of Mae West, the lament of an actor who can’t shed his costume, dramatic monologues, whiffs of gender slippage, a love lyric to the bride of Frankenstein, and a ten-minute play.
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Praise for Is This My Final Form?

Advance praise for Is This My Final Form?

“Amy Gerstler’s poetry is effortlessly brilliant, funny, tender, and wise. I read her poems and feel the pleasures and pains of being an imperfect being in this screwy, imperfect world. This book of poems might be the best so far by one of our finest poets.” —Matthew Zapruder, author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams and Story of a Poem
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Penguin Poets Series

Mesopotopia
End of Empire
Is This My Final Form?
the space between men
Hivestruck
mother
Being Reflected Upon
Colorfast
Thick with Trouble
Organs of Little Importance
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About the Author

Amy Gerstler
Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, art criticism, journalism and plays. She has published thirteen books of poems, a children's book and several collaborative artists books with visual artists. In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts CD Wright Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems published by Penguin in 2015 was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her book Bitter Angel won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, Poetry, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. More by Amy Gerstler
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