Bitter Angel: Poems (Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary) [Paperback]

Amy Gerstler (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Thanks to Carnegie Mellon's Contemporary Classics reprint press, Amy Gerstler's exceptional collection of poetry, which won the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award, is once again available. A cornucopia of innovative forms and ideas, Bitter Angel contains poems and prose poems that include allusive conversations with other literatures; for example, "Della's Modesty" begins with famous quotations by men on how women should deport themselves and alternates from the quotations to scenes from the life of Della Street, Perry Mason's sophisticated half. Or "Nature in Literature," a prose poem that imagines the conventions of syntax applied to the objective world. Gerstler remains one of the best of the Language poets.

From Publishers Weekly

Like the clairvoyant speaker in one of the many dramatic monologues in this imaginative collection, Gerstler (True Bride ) seems to have been "born without immunity / to this din in the air: / the sad humming of the long lost." Her characters inhabit the fringes of society: they are saints ("the more neurotic, unattractive / and accident-prone, the better"), homeless men, a sleepwalker and a hypnotist, and the "bitter angel" of the title poem, who unceremoniously appears in a "tinny, nickel-and-dime light." Innocents all, these would-be seers bear the burden of a hypersensitivity to the world around them and, because of it, share a kind of grace. For the poet, redemption seems to lie in the essential resilience of humanity, and in the belief in an elusive, Edenic landscape where "for every hurt / there is a leaf to cure it." Gerstler balances classical allusion with bold experimentation in voice, form and content, creating a tension that gives her work an urgent, honest edge.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 77 pages
• Publisher: Carnegie Mellon Univ Pr (December 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0887482317
• ISBN-13: 978-0887482311
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,671,694 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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