Medicine

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.