Gerald Stern's long poem I. is an extraordinary and wild compilation of poetic modes, moods, and registers-meandering and focused, hallucinatory and concrete, deranged and deeply ecstatic. Inspired by the sight of a derelict synagogue on the Lower East Side, I. is an intrinsically New York poem, concerned with shifting structures of place and identity in the face of time and rapid change. Though first written in the late aughts, Stern's brazen, mischievous politicality and blasphemous spirituality, refracted through the biblical book and prophetic character of Isaiah, feel particularly relevant to the present moment. Intertextual, critical, at times jubilant and derisive, I. brims with Stern's idiosyncratic mix of high intellect and chthonic populism.

The book features Stern's original introduction, as well as a foreword and afterword written by poet-luminaries Ross Gay and Alicia Ostriker.

Gerald Stern calls upon his own life as a ground for his poems. Showing a horror of lies, treachery, and war, he offers redemption through stark language and plain speech. His poems have an unerring, comic, relentless tone, never didactic, always surprising and rich in metaphor.

Stern meditates on the Lamb in Christianity and Judaism. He explores the mysterious life of the dragonfly in all its permutations and examines the comedy of the Marx Brothers and the idea of adultery in Noel Coward's film Brief Encounter. Interwoven with his formidable recollections (Stern, it would seem, forgets nothing) are the author's passionate discussions of his lifelong obsessions: issues of justice; his identity as a secular Jew who has strong objections to Israel's political positions; and the idea of neighbors in various forms--from the women of Gee's Bend who together make astonishing quilts to the Polish inhabitants of the small town of Jedwabne, who on a single day in 1941 slaughtered 1,600 Jews. Revealing a poet engaged with imagination, memory, and witness, and written in Stern's signature, associative style, Stealing History is a significant literary achievement by one of our most celebrated poets.

Following his National Book Award winner, This Time, Gerald Stern further explores history and memory, the casual miracles of relationships, and his irrevocable connection to the natural world. The weight of history and the bouyance of memory, the casual miracles of relationships, and his irrevocable connection to the natural world are some of Gerald Stern's ongoing themes in this new book. The poems in Last Blue range in tone from the joyously unrestrained to the quietly somber. A Stern poem can begin with the majestic cadences of an Old Testament psalm, turn on an almost invisible hinge, and bring into focus the smallest detail. Here is a radiant collection from an essential voice in American poetry.

Stern recounts his life, itself a grand digression, which takes him from Pittsburgh, to the Army, to Paris on the GI Bill, and back to the United States, where he immerses himself in the literary culture around him. Stern's early and traumatic loss of his older sister provides the occasion to imagine what her life might have been, and he revels in his past love affairs, the many women beloved in his life. He recollects books that occupy his recent reading--the work of W.G. Sebald, Blaise Cendrars, and Louis-Ferdinand C line--and how memory is always at the heart of literary accomplishment and what creates the staying power of great literature.

Death Watch is as an account of a beloved poet's final journey; a vivid, passionate, and, at times, whimsical look at the gamble of living life to its fullest, choosing the life of a poet, philosopher, prophet, lover, radical, and perpetual troublemaker.

The poems in this new volume by the winner of the National Book Award span countries and centuries, reflecting on memory, aging, history, and mortality. Hamlet Naked traverses Manhattan in the 1960s from a Shakespeare play on 47th Street to the cellar of a Ukrainian restaurant in the East Village; Thieves and Murderers encompasses musings of the medieval French poet Fran ois Villon and Dwight Eisenhower; Orson recounts a meeting of the poet and Orson Welles, exiled in Paris. Gerald Stern recalls old cars he used to drive--the 1950 Buick / with the small steering wheel / and the cigar lighter in the back seat--as well as intimate portraits of his daily life and the mussel-pooled and the heron-priested shore of Florida. These are wistful, generous, lively love poems and elegies that capture the passage of time, the joys of a sensual life, and remembrances of the past.

For five decades, Gerald Stern has been writing his own brand of expansive, deep-down American poetry. Now in his nineties, this sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary (Edward Hirsch) engages a lifetime of memories in his poems, blending philosophical, wide-ranging intellect with boisterous wit.

Memory unites the poems in Blessed as We Were, which reach back through seven collections written over almost two decades. Stern explores casual miracles, relationships, and the natural world in Last Blue (2000); offers a satirical and redemptive vision in Everything Is Burning (2005) and Save the Last Dance (2008); meditates on the metamorphosis of aging in In Beauty Bright (2012); and captures the sensual joys of life--even when they are far in the past--in the wistful love poems and elegies of Galaxy Love (2017). The volume concludes with over two dozen new poems that combine the metaphysical with the domestic, from the passage of time and the cost of love to the profound banality of cardboard and its uses.

With his characteristic exuberant, oracular voice animating every line, Stern reminds us why he is one of the great American poets, one who has long been telling us that the best way to live is not so much for poetry, but through poetry (New York Times Book Review).

For five decades, Gerald Stern has been writing his own brand of expansive, deep-down American poetry. Now in his nineties, this sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary (Edward Hirsch) engages a lifetime of memories in his poems, blending philosophical, wide-ranging intellect with boisterous wit.

Memory unites the poems in Blessed as We Were, which reach back through seven collections written over almost two decades. Stern explores casual miracles, relationships, and the natural world in Last Blue (2000); offers a satirical and redemptive vision in Everything Is Burning (2005) and Save the Last Dance (2008); meditates on the metamorphosis of aging in In Beauty Bright (2012); and captures the sensual joys of life--even when they are far in the past--in the wistful love poems and elegies of Galaxy Love (2017). The volume concludes with over two dozen new poems that combine the metaphysical with the domestic, from the passage of time and the cost of love to the profound banality of cardboard and its uses.

With his characteristic exuberant, oracular voice animating every line, Stern reminds us why he is one of the great American poets, one who has long been telling us that the best way to live is not so much for poetry, but through poetry (New York Times Book Review).

Galaxy Love spans countries and centuries, reflecting on memory, aging, history, and mortality. In wistful, generous, and lively love poems and elegies, National Book Award winner Gerald Stern captures the passage of time, the joys of a sensual life, and remembrances of the past.

The Preacher's a poem with polyphonic voices, enormous range, and many of Stern's familiar icons: his animism, his city grit, his philosophical fragments, his irony and justice quest, his reaching for the strain of memory.--Ira Sadoff

Gerald Stern is the author of fourteen poetry books, including This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 National Book Award. He taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fifteen years, and he is the recipient of many awards, including the Lamont Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the National Jewish Book Award for poetry.