Ghost Girl (Poets, Penguin) [Paperback]

Amy Gerstler (Author)

Book Description

Series: Poets, Penguin | Publication Date: April 6, 2004

Sly and sophisticated, direct, playful, and profound, Amy Gerstler’s new collection highlights her distinctive poetic style. In thirty-seven poems, using a variety of dramatic voices and visual techniques, she finds meaning in unexpected places, from a tour of a doll hospital to an ad for a CD of Beethoven symphonies to an earthy exploration of toast. Gerstler’s abiding interests—in love and mourning, in science and pseudoscience, in the idea of an afterlife, in seances and magic—are all represented here. Entertaining and erudite, complex yet accessible, these poems will enhance Gerstler’s reputation as an important contemporary poet.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Amid the grab bag of discursive forms that make up Gerstler's eighth collection, single anecdotes animate several poems, as when a speaker misreads an offer for "Beethoven's Complete Symphonies" as "Beethoven's Complete Sympathies" and indulges in the not-so-surprising riff: "This immortal/ master... has not forgotten those left behind/ to endure gridlock and mind-ache,/ wearily crosshatching the earth's surface/ with our miseries...." Gerstler has a bit of a Billy Collins problem, writing poems that tussle with, but never quite extend, intentionally light premises that conceal serious subjects: domestic life, evolution and chronic stagnation, magic and the supernatural. In "Touring the Doll Hospital," for instance, the speaker asks, "Why so many senseless injuries?" and a few lines later, sighs, "Small soldiers with no Geneva Convention to protect them...." Such jokes tend to sink pieces in which some version of the spirit world is invoked: "Witch Songs" refers to an "invitation/ written in semen and ashâ€"/ can't we just reply in ink?" while, "The Oracle at Delphi, Reincarnated as a Contemporary Adolescent Girl," begins, "I'm high most of the time on hallucinogenic fumes." Often, one doubts the poet's own investment in particular poems. What to make of a long catalogue, "Fuck You Poem #45," which reads like an undergraduate exercise: "Fuck you in slang and conventional English./ Fuck you in lost and neglected lingoes./ Fuck you hungry and sated; faded, pock marked and defaced./ Fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste." While the collection's formal heterogeneity is refreshing, too many of the pieces here feel tossed off.
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From Booklist

Funny, mischievous, and wry, Gerstler is technically skilled, profoundly curious, often bemused, inventive, and playful. Were she part of a constellation of poets, her neighbors would include Albert Goldbarth, Denise Duhamel, and Kim Addonizio, even as she whirls alone within her own glowing aura, alternating between deeply carnal considerations of food and sexuality and contemplations of such otherworldly manifestations as ghosts, oracles, and mediums. Gerstler's take on femaleness is appropriately spiky and her attunement to animal consciousness clever. She is piquant and creepy in a poem about dolls inviting abuse and stand-up-comic hilarious in a riff on the query, "And what, praytell, were you wearing?" and a poem based on her misreading of a CD offer for "Beethoven's Complete Sympathies." Elsewhere Gerstler, the author of a half-dozen distinctive collections, including Medicine (2000), contemplates such classic predicaments as lost love and unexpected widowhood, veers into biblical themes, and saucily yet incisively observes, "Who's to say celestial insight can't ride / into the mind on a forkful of sour cherry pie?" Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); First Edition, edition (April 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0142000647
• ISBN-13: 978-0142000649
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #987,728 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Words Flower From Her Mouth, October 26, 2004

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ghost Girl (Poets, Penguin) (Paperback)

The cover shows us a young girl blindfolded with her fingers poised over a planchette, some kind of Ouija board game with a pencil attached so that it writes too. I suppose the idea is to suggest that the poet brings us messages from another world as does the medium. Amy Gerstler has written a number of fine books but this is perhaps the best she's ever given us, partly for the reason that she seems so invested in exploration of this concept. Not only does the concept allow free rein to her trademark humor and irony, but she allows something genuinely chilling to creep into her work and thus, I disagree with the Publishers Weekly review printed above, I don't think that Gerstler has a Billy Collins problem at all, although I can see why the reviewer battened on this aspect of her cultural production. Not every poem, after all, is as successful as the best of them, but here she keeps her readers happily engorged in a very high average, and the poems are not just simple one trick ponies, she has earned our esteem with some quite long and complicated sorties towards what might be called her version of the "serial poem."

"Listen, Listen, Listen" is an extended meditation on the nature of sound, its manufacture and reception. Gerstler has always been a poet of exquisite verbal interplay, and now she parts some of the obfuscation to examine close-up the way her effects are born. In the same vein, "On Wanting to See Ghosts" reflects not only a cynicism and resistance to the mystic, but a tender vulnerability and a deep appreciation of human nature and our need to reach out and find more on the other side of death. Ectoplasm is comical, let's face it. "What's that stuff erupting from her mouth now? Wadded up wedding veil? Celestial drool? One of heaven's tiny geysers?" Many of Gerstler's poems have a dramatic edge to them, as though Browning were leaning in on that planchette too, whispering in her ear. She is half a novelist and the book is filled with stories told as vignettes, end-rhymes, enjambments. GHOST GIRL reflects the way metaphors of poetry and of femininity are deeply embedded into popular discourses of spiritualism.

And the implications are staggering. I love the way Gerstler hints that the practice of poetry is now being delimited by "professionalism" among poets what with the rise of MFA programs and the increasing competition among poets for a handful of positions "teaching poetry" in the AWP: "Only mediums who have been investigated and found conscientious and reliable," she writes wisely, "may advertise in these pages."

There will be few books in this decade with the eclat or the brilliance of GHOST GIRL. She's so good she doesn't even have to try and yet she does, again and again.

1 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars WHERE'S THE BEEF?, January 19, 2005

By 

clefpalate (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ghost Girl (Poets, Penguin) (Paperback)

Amy Gerstler seems to be missing a left brain. Her half-baked meanderings are mere word play, not poetry in the true sense. If you get a buzz from words alone (and don't give a damn about a poem's meaning - or lack of it) skip Gerstler and read Sexton or Ashbery. They dazzle. It's hard to see Ghost Girl when she's wearing the Emperor's clothes.