Is This My Final Form?

Advance praise for Is This My Final Form?

“In this collection Gerstler works with themes of transformation, transition, and becoming, all with wit and unexpectedness.” —Lit Hub, “Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025”

“If you’re hungry for soul-searching, then try ‘Is This My Final Form?’ . . . you’ll want to read [these poems] again and think anew.” —Terri Schlichenmeyer, The Philadelphia Tribune

“Readers can expect irreverence, wit . . . and a tone that feels just about right for heading into 2025. As ‘Wound Care Instructions’ opens, ‘This is the inside-out of the sublime.’” —Lit Hub

“Amy Gerstler’s exceptional book of poetry, Is This My Final Form?, leaps from surrealism to elegy as it ponders life’s unpredictability . . . This delightfully odd collection amazes with its range of voices and techniques.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“Rooted in intricate sources, Gerstler’s poems leaf and flower with buoyancy and mischief . . . For Gerstler, wild nature is a vast theater of wonders and mysteries, while human nature is a welter of memories, desire, regrets, and confusion. Her funny and arresting poems explore these meshing realms with cascading sensory detail . . . Frolicsome and resonant.” —Booklist

“In her follow up to 2021’s Index of Women, award-winning Gerstler takes on aging, death, metamorphosis, and the mystery of sound and music in her signature voice, both accessible and keenly observant . . . A must for any contemporary poetry collection, reflecting the dizzying confusion of aging and avoiding plague in the modern era.”—Library Journal

“This spirited volume is filled with surprises that only Gerstler (Index of Women) could conceive of . . . Gerstler’s poems may be filled with shifting forms, but they are deeply grounded in human desire, longing, loss, and the things that make humans the tender beings they are . . . Readers will be delighted and entranced.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Amy Gerstler’s poetry is effortlessly brilliant, funny, tender, and wise. I read her poems and feel the pleasures and pains of being an imperfect being in this screwy, imperfect world. This book of poems might be the best so far by one of our finest poets.” —Matthew Zapruder, author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams and Story of a Poem