"Your thoughts become fluid, volatile; their aroma fills the room. This is a nerve storm." In her first collection since Bitter Angel, winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award, Amy Gerstlerexplores themes of suffering and redemption through a heady blend of folklore, popular culture, and the natural world in Nerve Storm. The poet Eileen Myles has said that "the supernatural, the sexy mundane, the out-of-sight are simply [Gerstler's] materials, employed as they might be in a piece of religious art." A crackling wit and whimsical instinct guide this collection as Gerstler traipses through humanity's triumphs and blunders, effortlessly revealing the surreal and surprising possibilities inherent in everyday life.

Nerve Storm ( Penguin Poets)

Literature & Fiction

Gerstler, Amy

Poetry

Penguin Publishing Group

When Chessa is kidnapped by Ragnor of York, Cleve sets out to rescue her. After all, he’s the one who negotiated her marriage to William of Normandy, and his word is one the line. When a storm blows Chessa and her Kidnappers onto Hawkfell Island, outrageous complications set in. In the third novel of this Viking trilogy, Cleve of Lord of Raven’s Peak and Chessa of Lord of Hawkfell Island first meet when Chessa is the princess of Ireland. Cleve has no memory of the time before he was a slave. When vivid dreams kindle memories of his native Scotland, Cleve’s goal becomes to return to Loch Ness to claim his inheritance. But first, there is Chessa to be rescued and handed over to her rightful groom. When Cleve arrives at Hawkfell Island, he learns that Chessa not only refuses to marry Ragnor of York, she won’t consider William of Normandy either. She wants to marry him! Her strategies to bring this about anticipate Machiavelli by 600 years. Chessa and Cleve may be bullheaded, but they’re no match for Ragnor of York, who will have you laughing at his abominable antics. One thing about Ragnor, he never knows when to say when. All the characters from the first two Viking novels are back, all five years older now—but not necessarily wiser—and ready to stick their oars into Cleve’s and Chessa’s problems. And you’ll have these questions answered: Is Cleve’s father really a master sorcerer? Is there truly a Loch Ness monster?

Crown of Weeds: Poems (Penguin Poets)

Penguin??Books

Amy Gerstler has won acclaim for complex yet accessible poetry that is by turns extravagant, subversive, surreal, and playful. In her new collection, Medicine, she deploys a variety of dramatic voices, spoken by such disparate characters as Cinderella's wicked sisters, the wife of a nineteenth-century naturalist, a homicide detective, and a woman who is happily married to a bear. Their elusive collectivity suggests, but never quite defines, the floating authorial presence that haunts them. Gerstler's abiding interests--in love and mourning, in science and pseudo-science, in the idea of an afterlife--are strongly evident in these new poems, which are full of strong emotion, language play, surprising twists, and a wicked sense of black humor.

Medicine (Penguin Poets)

Reference

Sly and sophisticated, direct, playful, and profound, Amy Gerstler’s new collection highlights her distinctive poetic style. In thirty-seven poems, using a variety of dramatic voices and visual techniques, she finds meaning in unexpected places, from a tour of a doll hospital to an ad for a CD of Beethoven symphonies to an earthy exploration of toast. Gerstler’s abiding interests—in love and mourning, in science and pseudoscience, in the idea of an afterlife, in seances and magic—are all represented here. Entertaining and erudite, complex yet accessible, these poems will enhance Gerstler’s reputation as an important contemporary poet.

Ghost Girl (Penguin Poets)

Literary

A surreal new collection from an acclaimed poet Hallucinogenic plants chant in chorus. A thoughtful dog grants an interview. A caterpillar offers life advice. Amy Gerstler’s newest collection of poetry, Dearest Creature, marries fact and fiction in a menagerie of dramatic monologues, twisted love poems, and epistolary pleadings. Drawing on sources as disparate as Lewis Carroll and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as abnormal psychology, etiquette, and archaeology texts, these darkly imaginative poems probe what it means to be a sentient, temporary, flesh-and-blood beast, to be hopelessly, vividly creaturely.

Dearest Creature (Penguin Poets)

United States

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.

Scattered at Sea (Penguin Poets)

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.

Index of Women (Penguin Poets)

Bitter Angel

NORTH POINT PRESS

Lee Mullican's paintings and drawings map the inner space of the mind and the outer space of the cosmos. Over a 50-year career, in works bursting with color, he sought a window onto the unconscious, without relinquishing the control of a skilled draftsman or references to the world around him. Influenced by Native American art and Surrealism, as well as Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, in 2005 Mullican's formidable oeuvre gets an overdue retrospective, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This exhibition catalogue is the most comprehensive collection of his work and includes an essay by organizing curator Carol S. Eliel and an homage to Mullican as a teacher and mentor by fellow Los Angeles painter Lari Pittman. Like another Lee (Bontecou) whose quiet career of working and teaching recently got a deserving retrospective, Mullican will emerge here as an American original.

Lee Mullican: An Abundant Harvest Of Sun

Arts & Photography

Pittman, Lari

Individual Artists

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

A reissuing of Bitter Angel, poems by Amy Gerstler.

Carnegie-Mellon University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gerstler, Amy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gerstler, Amy

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gerstler, Amy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Nerve Storm ( Penguin Poets)

Crown of Weeds: Poems (Penguin Poets)

Medicine (Penguin Poets)

Ghost Girl (Penguin Poets)

Dearest Creature (Penguin Poets)

Scattered at Sea (Penguin Poets)

Index of Women (Penguin Poets)

Bitter Angel

Lee Mullican: An Abundant Harvest Of Sun

Bitter Angel