Amy Gerstler's exceptional book of poetry, Is This My Final Form?, leaps from surrealism to elegy as it ponders life's unpredictability.
The language of transformation is integrated throughout. Aging and the seasons are examples of everyday changes. "As Winter Sets In" delivers "every day/ a new face you can't renounce or forsake." "When I was a bird," with its interspecies metamorphoses, introduces a more fantastical concept: "I once observed a scurry of squirrels,/ concealed in a hollow tree, wearing seventeenth/ century clothes. Alas, no one believes me." Elsewhere, speakers fall in love with the bride of Frankenstein or turn to dinosaur urine for a wellness regimen.
The collection contains five thematic slices. Part I spotlights women behaving badly (such as "Marigold," about a wild friend; and "Mae West Sonnet," in an hourglass shape); Part II focuses on music and sound. The third section veers from the inherited grief of "Schmaltz Alert" to the miniplay "Siren Island," a tragicomic Shakespearean pastiche. Part IV spins elegies for lives and works cut short. The final subset includes a tongue-in-cheek account of pandemic lockdown activities ("The Cure") and wry advice for coping ("Wound Care Instructions").
Monologues and sonnets recur--the title's "form" refers to poetic structures as much as to personal identity. Alliteration plus internal and end rhymes create satisfying resonance. In the closing poem, "Night Herons," nature puts life into perspective: "the whir of wings/ real or imagined/ blurs trivial things."
This delightfully odd collection amazes with its range of voices and techniques. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck