How do you cope with change? Is your immediate impulse to resist, to throw your fists up, small as they are, in change’s baffling face? Or do you scurry away, hide in some burrow or crypt where you believe change will never find you? Maybe you resign yourself to change, reluctantly allowing it to buffet you this way and that, surrendering whatever autonomy you thought you had. It often feels like there’s no effective approach when it comes to life’s twists and turns. But Amy Gerstler’s newest poetry collection, Is This My Final Form?, suggests there is. Gerstler’s poems reveal that, when it comes to confronting change, perhaps our most subversive strategy is that of delight.

 

Is This My Final Form? is chock-full of change—physical and metaphysical, relational and emotional. A bird becomes human; a man of moderation transforms into a hedonistic glutton; a cast of Shakespearean characters adapts to their transition into the realm of the dead. Seasons change, bodies change—everything. But running throughout the collection’s shifts and transfigurations is a radical undercurrent of delight, generated by Gerstler’s playful sensuality of sound, language, and image.

 

The imagery in Gerstler’s poems is plush and vibrant. In “The Bride of Frankenstein,” the speaker swoons that the title monstress’s “impersonation / of an angry swan is so feral that I long / to fill my mouth with feathers.” In “Anticipating Spring,” “Blossoms / ache to flash their panties a la cancan girls,” combining sensuality with Gerstler’s signature sense of wit. In ‘Novice,’ the speaker, “not quite ready to exit the sensual, [gulps] the mountain air as though it were claret.” Gerstler feeds us a confectionary of language throughout her book, knowing that we, like the aforementioned poem’s speaker, “really like sweets.” These poems have a taste that’s layered and complex, but also unashamedly delicious.

 

“Mae West Sonnet” is a stand-out poem that boldly announces its voluptuousness as it depicts how the starlet’s image transformed America’s sexual landscape, where “virtue [is] severed from gender.” The poem’s very form engages in this lush embrace of “frank sensuality,” mimicking West’s hourglass shape. Here, change is portrayed as both “chaos” and “liberation,” but West approaches it in “flattering gowns,” flaunting beauty and delight in the face of others’ resistance.

 

Many of the poems in Is This My Final Form? incorporate the power of music and voice, both a means of meeting the effects of change on equal footing and willing one’s own transformations. In “Finding Your Voice,” even though “your mind’s shy / as an otter drying a saint’s feet with her fur,” the speaker urges you to “call up a yowl to rouse owls,” to “sing out a sentence that echoes on Pluto.” In “The Story of Music,” the speaker notes how “we need / songs to soothe kitchen ghosts,” demonstrating song’s ability to ease the uneasy. The speaker in “Pucker and Fizz,” an Ars Poetica of sorts, thanks poetry (a sister of song) “for protecting me from collapse, sack, / overthrow, and defeat.” The poem’s language is teeming with energy and sonic pleasure, playing with the joys of rhyme:

 

Poems are prophetic. Or mimetic

Or eidetic or pathetic. Or regret-ic.

Or pleading. Poems can be free-

wheeling seas of molten feeling.

 

Through the delights of sound and song, Gerstler’s speakers are not only ready to confront change but to instigate it, to “make sounds evolve / by doing things you were told you couldn’t do.” Gerstler navigates landscapes of change not only with deftness but with vibrato, serenading us through the zigs and zags of living.

 

The collection’s threads of delight by no means discount the terrors of change; there are dashes of sugar in Gerstler’s writing, but there’s no sugar-coating. Even when the tone sings, the grief persists, as in “For E.”: “How dizzily I miss you / this minute in which I find myself so much / older, darling, than you ever lived to be.” Gerstler acknowledges the dread that bodily aging and decay can bring in “Having checked the Egyptian Book of the Dead out of the library”:

 

                                                Who isn’t

horrified to rot after death, abandoned body

stinking and swelling, worms partying hard

in your corpse?

 

But we can find comfort, according to “Wound Care Instructions,” in human solidarity and simple, pleasurable things:

 

            Don’t suppose you’re special:

everyone’s shell-shocked. Give the night sky

some quality time. Never neglect the wet

blue moon. Yaks still clash at sunset. Soup,

shoes, and sure-footedness still exist. Books

and music too. So don’t let yourself go. Hang

on to others tightly, nightly, till all hells

are emptied.

 

Reading Is This My Final Form? left me with a sense of hope, but not the hollow, reductive kind. It’s a hope with a bit of an attitude; the possibility of approaching capital-C Change with a grin on one’s face, asserting one’s right to enjoy life no matter what ungainly twists it might bring. This isn’t an easy answer; neither is it the only one. There are, of course, some larger changes, especially political ones, that delight alone may not be equipped to confront. But I dare you to try it, at least in your personal life. I am twenty-five years old, and my hair is turning gray. I could mourn this fact and commit to a future of costly cut & dyes. Or I could refer to Gerstler’s poem “keep walking” and ask myself: “if something wondrous starts to happen / will you let it?”

 

Is This My Final Form? confirms what I already knew about Gerstler from her previous collections: that she can adroitly employ humor and charm without compromising her sense of depth. But nothing about this collection was redundant. Gerstler applies her signature voice in fresh ways, telling new stories and plumbing new fathoms of emotion as each poem approaches change and all its complexities in a different light. But the thread of delight throughout remains to me the most compelling aspect of her book, what will pull me back again and again when I need poems that will elate and devastate me at the same time; poems that will grab me and hold me “soft as a rough hug.”

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