Is This My Final Form?

by Amy Gerstler

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.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2025

About the author

Known for its wit and complexity, Amy Gerstler's poetry deals with themes such as redemption, suffering, and survival. Author of over a dozen poetry collections, two works of fiction, and various articles, reviews, and collaborations with visual artists, Gerstler won the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Bitter Angel (1990). Her early work, including White Marriage/Recovery (1984), was highly praised. Gerstler's more recent works include Nerve Storm (1993), Medicine (2000), Ghost Girl (2004), Dearest Creature (2009), which the New York Times named a Notable Book of the Year, and Scattered At Sea (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Born in 1956, Gerstler is a graduate of Pitzer College and holds an M.F.A. from Bennington College. She is now a professor in the MFA writing program at the University of California, Irvine. Previously, she taught in the Bennington Writing Seminars program, at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and the University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing Program. She lives in California with her husband, the artist and author Benjamin Weissman.

Reviews

[kale hensley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amy Gerstler will always be one of my favorite contemporary poets. Her imagination is unmatched and her approaches to writing grief in particular are so nuanced. She’s a leaper whose wit should be more widely read. My favorite poem was “Voicemail from Satan.”

[Kelly ♈ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amy Gerstler, wow...

Her writing is so striking and gorgeous. I fell instantly in love with it.

It also makes me realize what the glaring difference is between hers and poetry I've written in the past, and of poetry I've read of other people's I've known: honesty. We were trying to paint the ocean with our words in a manner we thought would sound beautiful. Amy writes the same poem enmeshed with the ocean, overtaken by it. She surrenders to her art. We weren't surrendering to anything beyond something superficial. I realize that now.

I also noticed a deliberate attention to the arrangement-- the brief, into the longest at the core, and back out into poems contemplating existence and what comes after, concluding in one about the night.

I will be fondly, enamoredly... remembering this collection for a long time.

P.S. 👋 Astrology nerd here. Someone pleeease tell me her sign?? 💙

[gyanve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely interesting

[phoebe · Rating 3 out of 5]

i can't say i'm a fan of poetry that is dated/makes specific references to pop culture or 21st century things ("spotify", "hot cheetos", "stayin' alive by the squeaky-voiced bee gees"), and that is why i can't rate this higher, though i might add another half star. but in general, i feel that gerstler says a lot of confusing stuff only for the purpose of sounding sophisticated or avant garde—and to be honest, that is my gripe with a lot of contemporary poetry. y'all be taking indeterminacy a little bit too far...

but there are exceptions! i do like gerstler's use of enjambment and the way it makes her poetry feel conversational and almost like stream of consciousness. she uses a lot of humour (i have never laughed quite so much reading a poetry collection) but beneath that is something more genuine, something that feels like longing. she makes a lot of casual yet vulnerable confessions, as if her poems are addressed to somebody who is no longer there. in that way, her poetry is a way of processing death, loneliness, and grief, and i think that's beautiful. i can't say a majority of the poems are successful, but there are a couple that do really hit, like my favorite:

For E.
Pardon me for pretending I might wish
you back into existence so we could chat.
Better yet, I'd remain silent and bask
in the sound of your voice--music I'm
ashamed I can no longer quite call
to mind. I do remember your habit
of chattering your teeth in a cartoonish
manner when you got nervous or
bored. And I'm easily re-seized by how
keenly I once yearned to be your home
away from home, your quiet, tree-lined
street between the park and that old stone
church. But you slipped out of the party
too soon, just as you always threatened
you'd do. Remember being breathless
together on the observation deck of the
Empire State Building? We took the last
elevator up to the 86th floor, at 1:15 a.m.,
inhaled what drugs you had, and damn!
they were good. How dizzily I miss you
this minute in which I find myself so much
older, darling, than you ever lived to be.

[Seth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous, clever, funny and at times touching poems. I picked this collection on the whim attracted to the cover and the first poem called “When I was a bird” and another about an how she thinks Frankenstein’s Bride is the perfect woman. I enjoyed a lot of these poems, the frankness or the language while remaining emotionally alive and inventive.

[Zuska · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few poems in this book I absolutely loved - Schmalt Alert was definitely my favorite - and many that I really liked, and then a good many that just sailed past me. Too clever for me.

Section III contains Siren Island which is a poem in the form of a short play, or a short play written as a poem, about the afterlife of people who have died by suicide. It and Schmaltz Alert alone make the book worth buying.

[Bentley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Night Guidance, Leniency Letter, Postcard, Downsizing, The Cure, The Lure of the Unfinished, One Who Is Always Arriving, Voicemail from Satan, Animal Light, Invention, For E., Anticipating Spring, As Winter Sets In, Schmaltz Alert, My Witch, and Novice were delicious. The rest, tragically, should have stayed in Gerstler's notebook.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several of these poems reminded me of a more congenial, less jaundiced Frederick Seidel—which is a good thing! The "ten-minute play" in the middle of the book was an interesting failure—memorable but not enjoyable. I would definitely like to seek out more of Gerstler's work.

[M Delea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just love Gerstler's poems--they are imaginative and weird and moving and funny and are decidedly NOT navel gazing and self-involved and so vague as to be meaningless. Book 8 for the 2025 Sealey Challenge

[Vicki L. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not like the layout of the poems. I sm used to poetry havong a nice layout that compliments the text. The layout can really gelo the reader understand and enjoy the porm.

[Amanda Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite poems:
Étude
Finding Your Voice
Pucker and Fizz
Schmaltz Alert
As Winter Sets In
Having checked the Egyptian Book of the Dead out of the library:
Night Herons

[Judith Spiegel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gerstler is one of our finest poets and deserves accolades for this exquisitely crafted book. She's very smart, even wise, and always surprising. Formal but wild at times. And witty to the point of comedy.