Is This My Final Form?

This spirited volume is filled with surprises that only Gerstler (Index of Women) could conceive of. In “Finding Your Voice,” she drops what might be the world’s weirdest yet most precisely accurate simile: “Tonight, your mind’s shy as an otter drying a saint’s feet with her fur.” The next line shifts to the larger question the collection explores: “Is the dilemma not having a self, or possessing too many?” Gerstler’s poems may be filled with shifting forms, but they are deeply grounded in human desire, longing, loss, and the things that make humans the tender beings they are. “I regret not wanting what I’m supposed to want,” she writes in “Leniency Letter,” offering a list of mistakes and wrongdoings. And yet, there’s pleasure in not wanting what one is supposed to want, as Gerstler suggests in these confessions. At the end of “Leniency Letter,” she inquires, “Are we square now? Can I go?” The speaker does not feel remorse for being a singular, flawed being—and neither should the reader. “Don’t let your hearts get lost in the sauce/ as forests go velvet with moss,” she warns in one of her sonnets that masterfully plays with sound. Readers will be delighted and entranced. (Apr.)