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3.58 AVERAGE
3.58 AVERAGE
in this collection Gerstler speaks about a great many of my anxieties.
A raw and moving collection of poetry by Gerstler. She draws from many different sources to create vivid poems, both in terms of structure and content.
Mainly, after completing this collection, I’m really left unable to speak. It’s as though after what I just experienced, it’s best to stay quiet and appreciate the miraculous things that writers like Gerstler are capable of doing with words.
This collection wasn't consistently great, but it has a lot of great poems in it. Does that make sense?
"Womanishness" being my favorite. It is a fun and at the same time bleak book.
"Womanishness" being my favorite. It is a fun and at the same time bleak book.
AHHH THE IMAGERY ! loved this as a whole, poems that stood out were sea foam palace, erotic psalm, womanishness, bon courage, early greek philosophy
If I could eat these words, I would. There were a handful of poems in this collection that have been added to my favorites of all time. Unfortunately, this collection is not consistently good, and there was one in particular ("Account of Former Lives") that was actually quite terrible, especially in comparison to the rest of the collection. First half was ROCK SOLID in terms of beautiful language and evocative wordplay (with a mostly ocean motif, hence the title), but the later section completely lost me a few times with much lower quality work interspersed between otherwise fantastic poems. Overall, I was impressed by the depth of the author's confrontation with death, aging, grief, existentialism, sexuality, and all the messy complexities that make us human.
There's a (retrograde? tired? dull?) grief to this collection that reminds me Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap. Neither collection is BAD, but neither collection does anything remarkable either. It's difficult for me to pin down exactly what it is about these collections that hits me as (for lack of a better word) domesticated. There's the slice-of-life soccer-mom-controversial sexuality and silliness, the rusted hinge between these tones and the real grief that select poems express, the monologic of each poem.
I think it's telling to me that I keep my eyes open for Gerstler's use of parentheticals. When they appear, as in the final line of "Prehistoric Porn Film," they reorient the entirety of the poem. It's in her asides, when she's not dashing off witticisms and merely-though-admittedly interesting turns of phrase, that she turns her own poem inside out. It's not lost on me that "Prehistoric Porn Film" is also one of the few poems that feels independently strong despite seeming secondary to the whole of Scattered at Sea: Gerstler's parenthesis are the detritus of a grief she chose to spackle over.
It's like she bricked in a hammered Hamlet.
I think it's telling to me that I keep my eyes open for Gerstler's use of parentheticals. When they appear, as in the final line of "Prehistoric Porn Film," they reorient the entirety of the poem. It's in her asides, when she's not dashing off witticisms and merely-though-admittedly interesting turns of phrase, that she turns her own poem inside out. It's not lost on me that "Prehistoric Porn Film" is also one of the few poems that feels independently strong despite seeming secondary to the whole of Scattered at Sea: Gerstler's parenthesis are the detritus of a grief she chose to spackle over.
It's like she bricked in a hammered Hamlet.
reflective
medium-paced