Amy Gerstler reads a poem about Hope: Hoffnung.
He fancies his chances are good with her,
unaware that in the years since the war
she has come to prefer women whose cunts
taste like mustard. To pin one’s hopes on
a bark-colored moth, its wings crinkled
like crepe paper, a moth affixed high
on the kitchen wall, frozen for days where
it will likely die in noble clinging mode
just under the cobwebby heating vent,
is to confirm your need for more friends
and a greater daily quota of sunlight.
To raise C.’s hopes that T. can stop
drinking and then to liken those
hopes to fields of undulating grain,
alfalfa perhaps, is to wish C. hip deep
in acres of unscythed denial. The blind
typist hopes she’ll be hired tonight without
her disability becoming an issue. L. said he felt
hope’s rhizomes race throughout his body,
radiating in all directions, like some incipient
disease he’d been fighting since childhood.
Hope, he said, it’s as insidious as bitterness.
If mother earth only knew how much we
loved one another she would creak, shudder,
and split like a macheted melon, releasing
the fiery ball of molten hope at her core.
Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction, and journalism. 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. Amy Gerstler’s new collection, Scattered at Sea (Penguin Books) evokes notions of dispersion, diaspora, sowing wild oats, minds, and mortality. Using 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, Gerstler draws from an array of sources, including the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, 1950s recipes, the Babylonian Talmud, and Walter Benjamin’s writing on his drug experiences. The Washington Post compared Scattered at Sea with “a wave that knocks you over and changes how you view the world. . .mixes salty humor, invigorating rhythms and sharp-edged wisdom.”
