Medicine

<b>Amy Gerstler</b> has won acclaim for complex yet accessible poetry that is by turns extravagant subversive surreal and playful. In her new collection <b>Medicine</b> she deploys a variety of dramatic voices spoken by such disparate characters as Cinderella's wicked sisters the wife of a nineteenth-century naturalist a homicide detective and a woman who is happily married to a bear. Their elusive collectivity suggests but never quite defines the floating authorial presence that haunts them. Gerstler's abiding interests--in love and mourning in science and pseudo-science in the idea of an afterlife--are strongly evident in these new poems which are full of strong emotion language play surprising twists and a wicked sense of black humor.