Is This My Final Form? (Penguin Poets)

Poet Amy Gerstler’s most recent collection, Is This My Final Form?, is a cipher through which the experience of women and men and all in between can be understood. As she works through feelings about aging, the poems field images of animals; as she considers what comes next, a theme of metamorphosis emerges, but it is not always positive. The collection, which includes a ten-minute play titled “Siren Island,” isn’t one meditation on living—it’s 77 pages of questions answered in stunning description.

The collection opens with what I’ll call a prologue poem since it appears prior to the start of section one; there are five labeled sections to the book. This poem, “When I Was a Bird,” laments what was lost while also celebrating what once existed. It includes language of flight, sex, birth, and disbelief—all hallmarks of a human life—and serves as a brilliant introduction to the rest of the book.

Some of the standout poems for me are those written for characters. “The Bride of Frankenstein” and “Mae West Sonnet” both appear in section one and are simultaneously heartbreaking and clever. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but there is a humor in their darkness. Section three includes two prose poems, “Mr. Moderation” and “The Fall,” which, when read together, illustrate two different kinds of dissatisfaction with the everyday. But the stunner appears on page 60: a brief poem titled “One Who Is Always Arriving” may well be the best newly written love poem I’ve read in a long while.