Is This My Final Form? - (Penguin Poets) by Amy Gerstler (Paperback)

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, a lullaby for adults, and a ten-minute play"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Advance praise for Is This My Final Form?

"In this collection Gerstler works with themes of transformation, transition, and becoming, all with wit and unexpectedness." --Lit Hub, "Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025"

"If you're hungry for soul-searching, then try 'Is This My Final Form?' . . . you'll want to read [these poems] again and think anew." --Terri Schlichenmeyer, The Philadelphia Tribune

"Readers can expect irreverence, wit . . . and a tone that feels just about right for heading into 2025. As 'Wound Care Instructions' opens, 'This is the inside-out of the sublime.'" --Lit Hub

"Amy Gerstler's exceptional book of poetry, Is This My Final Form?, leaps from surrealism to elegy as it ponders life's unpredictability . . . This delightfully odd collection amazes with its range of voices and techniques." --Shelf Awareness (starred review)

"Rooted in intricate sources, Gerstler's poems leaf and flower with buoyancy and mischief . . . For Gerstler, wild nature is a vast theater of wonders and mysteries, while human nature is a welter of memories, desire, regrets, and confusion. Her funny and arresting poems explore these meshing realms with cascading sensory detail . . . Frolicsome and resonant." --Booklist

"In her follow up to 2021's Index of Women, award-winning Gerstler takes on aging, death, metamorphosis, and the mystery of sound and music in her signature voice, both accessible and keenly observant . . . A must for any contemporary poetry collection, reflecting the dizzying confusion of aging and avoiding plague in the modern era."--Library Journal

"This spirited volume is filled with surprises that only Gerstler (Index of Women) could conceive of . . . Gerstler's poems may be filled with shifting forms, but they are deeply grounded in human desire, longing, loss, and the things that make humans the tender beings they are . . . Readers will be delighted and entranced." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"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

About the Author

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.