Dearest Creature

I just finished Dearest Creature by Amy Gerstler. This marvelous collection of poems is chock full of luscious secrets and surprises, amazing, tantalizing sentence structures and dazzling arrays of adjectives. The poems all demonstrate a similar mastery of word and image, but are written from different voices, different characters with different emotional temperaments. I really was captivated by this book.

Every line is deserving of quotes, as the writing is really astounding, left me awestruck. One of all the many that jumps out:

... aired molecules of your blue
sense of humor loosed into fickle April haze
like microscopic weather balloons to whom
did you leave your false eyelashes your work
ethic your taste for the stick-to-the-ribs foods
of your youth an abject gooseneck lamp
on your nightstand hangs its head and prays
the way mute objects do when left behind
strange it doesn't implode make some move
to accompany you but rather remains like 
the bust of some shamed alien conqueror
its long neck bent like a penitent swan's.

The last section of the collection, Elegy (these quote lines come from the end of the first poem in it), is devoted to the loss of a dear friend, and sadness as well as profound awe seep through the lines.