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  • Published: 16 June 2021
  • ISBN: 9780143136217
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 112
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

Index of Women



From a "maestra of invention" (The New York Times) who is at once supremely witty, ferociously smart, and emotionally raw, a new collection of poems about womanhood

From a "maestra of invention" (The New York Times) who is at once supremely witty, ferociously smart, and emotionally raw, a new collection of poems about womanhood

Amy Gerstler has won acclaim for sly, sophisticated, and subversive poems that find meaning in unexpected places. Women's voices, from childhood to old age, dominate this new collection of rants, dramatic monologues, confessions and laments. A young girl muses on virginity. An aging opera singer rages against the fact that she must quit drinking. A woman in a supermarket addresses a head of lettuce. The tooth fairy finally speaks out. Both comic and prayer-like, these poems wrestle with mortality, animality, love, gender, and what it is to be human.

  • Published: 16 June 2021
  • ISBN: 9780143136217
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 112
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

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Praise for Index of Women

Praise for the poetry of Amy Gerstler:

"[Gerstler's poetry is] extremely rich. But not cluttered and not loud . . . the supernatural, the sexy mundane, the out-of-sight are simply her materials, employed as they might be in a piece of religious art." - Eileen Myles, author of Evolution

"[Gerstler's] poem has me crying in the airport." - Ada Limón, author of Bright Dead Things

"[Gerstler has been] one of my favorite poets since I read her book Bitter Angel. Now I have every book of hers on my shelves." - Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

"[Gerstler's poems are] charming and smart and emotionally targeted . . . clever [and] emotionally resonant . . . Witty, irreverent, self-deprecating--fundamentally kind." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"In Gerstler, we see how effective a quiet ruminative and contemplative poem can be . . . On the other hand, [Gerstler's] complex, humorous prose poems which can be as immediate and imagistic as a germ." - American Poetry Review

Praise for Amy Gerstler's previous collection, 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