Amy Gerstler, wow...

Her writing is so striking and gorgeous. I fell instantly in love with it.

It also makes me realize what the glaring difference is between hers and poetry I've written in the past, and of poetry I've read of other people's I've known: honesty. We were trying to paint the ocean with our words in a manner we thought would sound beautiful. Amy writes the same poem enmeshed with the ocean, overtaken by it. She surrenders to her art. We weren't surrendering to anything beyond something superficial. I realize that now.

I also noticed a deliberate attention to the arrangement-- the brief, into the longest at the core, and back out into poems contemplating existence and what comes after, concluding in one about the night.

I will be fondly, enamoredly... remembering this collection for a long time.