Medicine

""Dear Lord, fire-eating custodian of my soul,/ author of hemaphrodites, radishes,/ and Arizona's rosy sandstone,/ please protect this wet-cheeked baby/ from disabling griefs, "" Gerstler's eighth book of poems begins with a ""Prayer for Jackson"" that invokes a parent's hopes (""make him so charismatic/ that even pigeons flirt with him"") and fears for a childDeasily transposable onto this often luminous book. Following the NBCC Award-winning Bitter Angel, 1998's Crown of Weeds and some short fiction for magazines, this collection offers prose poems with long chains of noun phrases circling around delicate subjects (snow, solace); column-shaped, short-lined fantasias, often driven by rhyme, and also given to lists; and edgy, nearly surreal, loosely narrative poems in unrhymed, talk-like lines. Gerstler is a James Tate-like master of many familiar postmodern tropes, but the best poems here always have a distinctive spin, run through her abiding interests the intersections of self, soul sickness and cultural drek. A poem based on the ostensible proverb ""toasted cheese hath no master"" works itself out as an exploration of rhymes like ""pasture,"" ""repast, sir,"" and ""Chinese aster."" ""The Bride Goes Wild"" consists entirely of film titles (""I ConfessDI'm No Angel, I Am the Law!""). And the longish title poem, spoken by a kind of mystical doctor, prides itself on incorporating brief catalogues of diseases, folk remedies, organs and tissues, and free-floating verbs: ""We read, breed, hope rarebit's/ on tonight's menu, consult our watches."" The radio play ""Lovesickness"" (for ""four disembodied voices"") seems genuinely meant for performance: its explorations of eros, physiology and distraction might sound wonderful on the air. If a fiction-writer's taste for rhetorical bravado can be obtrusive at times (""Away with your homely reproaches, you rough bundle of straw""), on the whole this is a vibrant and passionate collection of poems, one whose standouts are memorable and humane. (June)