Bitter Angel (Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Series: Poetry)

Thanks to Carnegie Mellon's Contemporary Classics reprint press, Amy Gerstler's exceptional collection of poetry, which won the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award, is once again available. A cornucopia of innovative forms and ideas, Bitter Angel contains poems and prose poems that include allusive conversations with other literatures; for example, "Della's Modesty" begins with famous quotations by men on how women should deport themselves and alternates from the quotations to scenes from the life of Della Street, Perry Mason's sophisticated half. Or "Nature in Literature," a prose poem that imagines the conventions of syntax applied to the objective world. Gerstler remains one of the best of the Language poets.