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Is This My Final Form?

Part of Penguin Poets

Author Amy Gerstler
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$20.00 US
Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books
28 per carton
On sale Apr 01, 2025 | 9780143138488
Sales rights: World
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A poet renowned for her “wit and complexity” (Poetry Foundation) explores the endless evolution and malleability of life on earth in her most curious, inventive collection to date

Aren’t we all shape-shifters? Is any animal, vegetable, or mineral—even a commonplace object—what it seems to be at any given moment? Who isn’t juggling constant transformations, conflicting roles, changing loyalties, loves, perceptions, and selves, all while being pummeled by shifting devotions, emotions, and obsessions? Do even the dead continue to evolve in surprising ways?

Reveling in these questions, Gerstler’s latest protean poetry collection includes loose sonnets, shapely praise of Mae West, the lament of an actor who can’t shed his costume, dramatic monologues, whiffs of gender slippage, a love lyric to the bride of Frankenstein, and a ten-minute play.
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”

“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

"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

About

A poet renowned for her “wit and complexity” (Poetry Foundation) explores the endless evolution and malleability of life on earth in her most curious, inventive collection to date

Aren’t we all shape-shifters? Is any animal, vegetable, or mineral—even a commonplace object—what it seems to be at any given moment? Who isn’t juggling constant transformations, conflicting roles, changing loyalties, loves, perceptions, and selves, all while being pummeled by shifting devotions, emotions, and obsessions? Do even the dead continue to evolve in surprising ways?

Reveling in these questions, Gerstler’s latest protean poetry collection includes loose sonnets, shapely praise of Mae West, the lament of an actor who can’t shed his costume, dramatic monologues, whiffs of gender slippage, a love lyric to the bride of Frankenstein, and a ten-minute play.

Praise

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”

“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

"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

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