Scattered at Sea

by Amy Gerstler

Overview

A dazzling new collection from an award-winning poet—longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry

Amy Gerstler has won acclaim for sly, sophisticated, and subversive poems that find meaning in unexpected places. The title of her new collection, Scattered at Sea, evokes notions of dispersion, diaspora, sowing one’s wild oats, having one’s mind expanded or blown, losing one’s wits, and mortality. Making use of dramatic monologue, elegy, humor, and collage, these poems explore hedonism, gender, ancestry, reincarnation, bereavement, and the nature of prayer. Groping for an inclusive, imaginative, postmodern spirituality, they draw from an array of sources, including the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, diagnostic tests for Alzheimer’s disease, 1950s recipes, the Babylonian Talmud, and Walter Benjamin’s writing on his drug experiences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143126898
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/26/2015
Series:	Penguin Poets
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	841,275
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

AMY GERSTLER is a writer of poetry, nonfiction, and journalism who lives in Los Angeles. Her ten previous poetry collections include Bitter Angel, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Dearest Creature, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Table of Contents

I Kissing

Sea Foam Palace 3

Erotic Psalm 5

Debris Trail 6

Prehistoric Porn Film 7

Kissing 8

A Sane Life 9

Fall on Your Knees 11

In Search of Something to Worship, My Eyes Lighted on You 12

II Womanishness

Womanishness 15

Thoughts of Trees at Twilight 16

Bon Courage 17

Cursing of the Party Responsible for Her Suffering 19

On Wanting to Be Male 20

Self-Portrait as Cave Lady 21

Merrythought 22

Pale Queen 23

Childlessness 24

III Dust of Heirs, Dust of Ancestors

Ancestor Psalm 27

Disclaimer 28

On Buying a Walker 31

Ancient Chinese Philosophy 33

The Dead Woman's Telephone 34

A Short History of Sublime Moments on Hold 36

Early Greek Philosophy 37

Elijah, dead prophet, roams the earth 38

Stoics 40

IV What I Did with Your Ashes

The Suicide's wife 43

Dear Nation of My Dead 46

Extracts from the Consoler's Handbook 47

He sleeps every afternoon 49

On the Idea the Dead May Live Vicariously Through Us 51

What I Did with Your Ashes 53

It was a splendid mind 54

V Only at Certain Sacred Locations

Account of Former Lives 63

A Terribly Sentimental Fork 64

Miraculous 66

Sassafras 67

Penance 68

Rumbles from a Minor Deity 70

Hoffnung 71

Kitchen Annunciation 73

Gratitude Prayer 74

Notes 77

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/15/2015
Gerstler (Dearest Creature), winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Bitter Angel, once again brilliantly amplifies the natural world in this blisteringly humorous 11th collection. Never shy, the poems zip between black comedy and earthy odes: “Regret clogs arteries. We stuff ourselves// with bread and sex. Then ash provides/ the most natural last transport// imaginable.” Each of the book’s five sections presents new speculations, references, and philosophies—a section titled “Womanish” provides distinctive gender commentary by cross-hatching social norms with absurdities: “A man’s sweat can get you pregnant. Beware./ Women have been fertilized by animal bites, dreams,/ swallowing insects, seawater, eating beans.” Gerstler’s dextrous poems work as satire as well as truthful reflections of humanness, often beautifully crushing in their honesty: “what shall remain/ of the hand-me-down earth/ for the meek to claim/ when lovers of blood sport/ have finished with it/ only a welling up/ of that last gasp: vapors of vapors.” What is most compelling is Gerstler’s dynamic consideration of spirituality, afterworlds, and reincarnations—dense subjects spellbound with unexpected brevity: “In one life I was a monk who won a newborn in a bet/ In this life Lord knows what is to happen yet.” Gerstler’s latest proves to be delightful, surreal and well-rounded book. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Scattered at Sea:

“This wry book is like a wave that knocks you over and changes how you view the world. . .[It] mixes salty humor, invigorating rhythms and sharp-edged wisdom.” —The Washington Post
                                                                             
“Scattered at Sea takes deep, often beautiful dips into matters of femininity, sexuality, and mortality, while staying fleet, feisty, and musical enough to feel like short adventures. .  .Gerstler’s real strength is in the way she collides the sensual with the spiritual. . .the world she creates is beautifully diffuse, as freeform as her poems are.” —The Boston Globe

“Scattered at Sea got under my skin in aways that I did not expect . . . [these poems] have a heart of sense-making. And that impulse toward gathering meaning from the shards of chaos is sorely needed in this particualr poetic and political moment . . . [Gerstler] reminds us of the struggle to be human in a capricious world." —Wendy Willis, Los Angeles Review of Books                                                                              
“Gerstler once again brilliantly amplifies the natural world in this blisteringly humorous eleventh collection. . .her dexterous poems work as satire as well as truthful reflections of humanness, often beautifully crushing in their honesty. . .what is most compelling is Gerstler’s dynamic consideration of spirituality, afterworlds, and reincarnations. . .[A] delightful, surreal, and well-rounded book.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

05/01/2015
"Pardon this frontal offensive,/ dear chum. Forgive my word-/ churn, my drift," says award-winning poet Gerstler in her opening poem, displaying her talent for threading heightened language with colloquial, offbeat wit (see, for instance, 2009's Dearest Creature). Her energy is high octane, sometimes even gleeful, as she surveys our scattered ways of being on this "hand-me-down earth." The frank sensuality—"thighs sticky, leakage streaked/ matted fur, meaty reek" starts the poem "Prehistoric Porn Film"—is a short leap to the just-missed closeness of men and women, individually and as genders. "I'd like to be you,/ for example,…were it granted/ me to test-drive being a man," says one poem, while another declares, "The dissonance of women. The shrill frilly silly/ drippy prissy pouty fuss of us." Even the more somber section "What I Did with Your Ashes" has its black humor, with the title poem opening "Shook the box like a maraca." But it says of the ashes, "Tasted them. You've gained a statue's flavor, like licking the pyramids, or/ kissing sandstone shoulders. I mean boulders," and suddenly one senses that beneath the dazzle here is a fierce, nearly frantic determination to hang on through life's bumpy ride. VERDICT Accomplished and involving; for all poetry collections—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Library Journal