Crown of Weeds

by Amy Gerstler

An award-winning poet explores language and love in a powerful, diverse collection of poetry. Amy Gertsler's latest collection engages the reader with a sensibility that is by turns extravagant, wistful, erudite, playful, and profound. Love lies in wait in these poems, populated with such as deserters from circuses, recipes, and the scent of geraniums. Gerstler twines language into sublime confections of elegance and silliness, seeking support between progress and pathology.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1997

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

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had seen an Amy Gerstler poem I liked, and so I randomly selected this 1997 volume from the library shelves.

Gerstler's strength is her plain language, combined with highly unusual images and perspectives. Many of the poems in this collection were bleak and hard for me to penetrate, yet each had its value of arresting ideas and descriptions.

When Gerstler chose to write more directly and personally, she produced her best poems, I think. One about her newborn nephew, and two about a brother who struggled with a brain tumor, were particularly touching and effective. Her is one of those poems.

Miasma

You claim there's a road
through this nightmare terrain.
over crevice and fissure,
hill and dale of that planet
afloat in the cup of your skull --
your thoughts' native soil,
a gray world thickly crisscrossed
by little rivers, shrouded in cloud.
You survived the peeling back
of your brain's protective
membranes, one dubbed dura mater,
"hard mother," by early surgeons
because it's so hard to cut through;
another called arachnoid
for its white likeness to spiderweb.
You joked drunkenly while waking
from an operation where virtuoso
neurosurgeons sliced your brain
like a rich birthday cake. It's
gross understatement to say your path's
strewn with obstacles: the migration
of proper names, the debris of seizures,
Demerol's flapping circus tent
dizzily printed with wild red spirals,
your family's abject panic --
all this enclosed by a survival
curve's high electrified fence.
Smiling, you comfort your loved ones,
fear lodged in their throats like fish bones.
I cannot say how much I admire you,
who purified himself at a moment's notice,
though I contend you were squeaky clean
at the start. Every day you pass through
this mapless landscape unharmed.
a fruit falling to earth, so sure
of its ripeness. Your convinction's
made a believer of me, your grim,
bewildered sister, who ought to turn
in the pile of books she's cowered
behind all her life and get in line
to become your disciple. Yes, I agree,
this miasma will evaporate,
just as you say. It will lift
like mist from the fine
blameless mind in which it began,
erased by a radiance whose source
is not glowing isotopes,
but your right and left
hemispheres, those fertile
interlocking continents,
homelands of your soul.

When she is most accessible, Gerstler's powerful language and images aslant give her poems their strongest impact.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

-Recipe for Trouble
-A Measured Joy
-Montage of Disasters
-Mixed Messages
-A Fan Letter

not a lot I liked in this collection but still a Gerstler helluva read. Here is my overall favorite.

"Song" is a must read for fans of bizarre absurdity.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems that each tell their own strange story - if there's a thread through them to pull the collection together, I didn't see it.

from To a Newborn: "You looked / like a furious, skinned / kitten. You looked cooked. / Roasted, to be precise. / I assume you'll cool. / I liked you enormously, due / to my affinity for anyone / pissed off, particularly / infants."

from A Fan Letter: "Dear Literary Hero, // Now that you've gently / slit open my envelope, / you see naked before you / on this plain drugstore stationery / watermarked with my tears, / the shaky handwriting of one / who has been given a second chance / and desires to use it wisely."

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amy Gerstler is one of my favorite living Ameican poets. There is always a tinge of darkness lurking in the background in her poems. i am probably way off base on this but there is something about her work that reminds me of John Ashbery (spelling is wrong!). Sort of layers of meanings or language on top of each other. Very textural, yet emotional at the same time.

[Mir]

Graciously welcome the truant
soul home as you stutter your love—
that thin tuneless exhaust
we exhale every day.

[Liz Scheid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Visceral, sardonic; highly descriptive. Dark and also laugh out loud funny.

[Maughn Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bewildering, beautiful poems that work (on me) on many levels.