Don’t Stop Me if You’ve Heard This Before

The tyranny of categories, the doldrums of definitions, the capital offense of the listicle—the absurd means by which we humans account for ourselves and the world we inhabit rank among our most self-limiting inventions. In Index of Women (Penguin, 2021), Amy Gerstler’s luminous, seething new collection, she resists unearned certainty by offering a different thought model for knowledge and attention: that of the titular index, an imagined ancient text, handed down in pieces, that chronicles the lives of women.

Gerstler has long immersed readers in the fates of the feminine-on-earth. In her previous collections—Index is her eleventh, following the sublime Scattered at Sea (2015)—she has written of sirens, saints, witches, and sages. She has written of those who are entangled with, or tethered to, someone else, cast in the role of daughter, mother, wife, lover, neighbor, patient, captive, casualty, or prey. She celebrates the natural world, too, understanding that animals are kin to humans and that every life is wondrous. In her poems, bodies kiss, leak, fume, and take each other in by way of mouths, wounds, and other orifices. It would betray this collection’s many registers and directions to read it solely against the backdrop of the previous four years of political ignominy, the period during which many of the poems first appeared. Yet, the insurgent rage and mourning that Gerstler pushes to the fore feel like sanity, like balm.

The book opens with its own Rosetta Stone: “{from an Introduction to some fragments of the Index of Women},” in which the speaker, who uses “we” and “us” pronouns in a manner that can feel at once inclusive and presumptuous, offers interpretations of this fictional ancestral book:

In fairness, evidence suggests that the authors
of this scattershot, fragmented volume never
called what they were collecting and setting
down an “epic,” “catalog,” or “index”
but instead used a term that most closely
translates to “inheritance” in our language.

Preserved within this form of no form—which the speaker later refers to as a “shattered epic” punctuated by the recurring refrain “of these women tell me”—are “vows, curses, recipes, regrets, prayers, elegies, love songs, tales of drug trips,” as well as proof of women’s vocations and identities, all precisely named:

such as she, swallower of swords, sorrow, and semen
such as she who is a physical stud
such as she who is born anew every second
such as she who breaks speed limits
such as she who represents the totality of what can be known

The mean math of the historical record is that the sum of its parts does not equal the whole, and that more has been left out, or willfully destroyed, than saved. But a silver lining: absence can double as a space of speculation, or, in this case, as an occasion for poems. Gerstler composes “from an Introduction” in part of words borrowed from Hesiod, Joseph Campbell, and even the Girl Scouts, deploying those quotes seamlessly alongside her own language, so that her poem performs as “a shifting chorus / of voices singing in unison.” Gerstler’s project deals not merely in recovery, but also in the revision and transformation of history as it’s been written, creating a new text from select pieces of old ones, materializing the very form of her imagined index.

Framed as shards of a kind, the other poems in the collection also double as corrections to the record, many dealing in subjects not traditionally deemed poetic. Gerstler leads the reader through some of the perilous pleasures of early womanhood, excavating memories from the time of virginal body and mind (“What your body has / promised for so long. The idea of your disastrous premiere. / The idea of someone laughing at you after.”) She imagines the exhausting and unpleasant lot of the Tooth Fairy (“I smell of chalk dust, old dental records, / ossuaries, loss, and skeletons cleaned of meat. My / breath is a whiff of extinction.”) “Ode to Birth Control” gives thanks to the complicated and bold women who fought for the pastes and goops, the pills and shields invented in the name of social and sexual liberation, with the poem’s speaker proclaiming: “I owe you all I’ve tried to be.”

Gerstler is terrifically, almost wantonly funny, as she renders her characters’ lives from distinct and oddball angles: the neurotic musings of a mother who goes on a date with her infant’s dermatologist (“She hoped he hated the movie. It might be difficult to have sex with someone truly enthused about cinematic drivel”); the scattered thoughts on the indignities of aging, womanhood, and love that interrupt a woman washing dishes (“after the initial vodka sip / she believes she could live a different kind of life entirely / perhaps in a tent?”); a grateful apostrophe to a fresh head of lettuce (“A lettuce is no less than me, so I respect you, / though it’s also true I may make a salad of you / later. That’s how we humans roll.”). Gerstler’s I’s, all shapeshifters, seem at times to be stand-ins for the poet herself, while at other times the voices run like ectoplasm from the mouth of a medium. As Gerstler writes in “Translation”:

the alphabet’s letters are my tribe
and I mean to live quietly among them
bending my body into meaningful shapes
perhaps entangled with yours
using our whole persons to confess
what can’t be, by any other means,
comprehended or expressed

In “An Aging Opera Singer Speaks at Her First AA Meeting,” Gerstler addresses matters of voice directly, writing of the strained, estranging relationship between a body and its sound, while also reimagining the fate of the poem’s diva. “Once I got sober god quit speaking to me,” she laments. For this soprano, disconnected from the divine, the world dulls and loses its music. She is given no exit aria, but instead a cruel punchline:

Don’t stop me
if you’ve heard this one before, just listen harder.
A washed-up warbler walked into a bar yesterday,
she being me, hoping to sit in the dark and let
fragments of chatter, human talk-song loosened
by booze, wash over her. She saw mouths moving
but could hear no sound. I consider this a brutal
kind of exile.

Gerstler’s women often express themselves as though they’ve just been freed from silence, released to ink their sticky humors and soupy moods, and register all of their contradictory reflections. In the harrowing and breathless “Black Coat,” a woman sits at a coffee shop counter late at night, picking at a sticky piece of pie while observing the sad sacks around her:

the old guy two stools
away has about as much as hair as a newborn
he’s staring at a covered glass cake dish like
it’s a UFO the alien pilot inside a big blinding
white slice of coconut cake the man has
deformed ears folded like tacos

The speaker’s thoughts—conveyed in a single, unpunctuated sentence with jagged line breaks—quickly and without warning veer into memory:

I tried to hug my husband
from behind and he grabbed me judo flipped
me over his shoulder onto the floor but that was
my bad since I startled him I woke up one morning
with his boot print on my cheek

The poet also tracks the subtler, often overlooked invasions of one’s body and mind. “Woman with Her Throat Slit” begins with an email request from one Derek Langtree regarding something called “Contract funds.” He asks the recipient to confirm that she is alive. In this relatively innocuous intrusion, Gerstler’s speaker finds both a target for her rage and an ear for her grief. With her bile bubbling over, she replies: “Mr. Langtree, which I’m aware / isn’t your real name, I’m in mourning. Between / the teeth of a disconcerting grief.” For those torn up by the death of a loved one, the stealing of one’s time and attention is an unbearable transgression that rips minutes off of the already descending countdown clock:

You’re an internet swindler.
How do you feel about that? I imagine you have
your reasons. I don’t want to be awake any
longer this evening, reduced to writing a thief
who doesn’t have the guts to case neighborhoods
and jimmy windows and instead siphons cash
from the gullible across a faceless international
netscape. Mr. Langtree, did you know, growing
old is violent, like being kidnapped, like waking up
to find your throat slit while you’re still alive and
able to burble words.

Throughout Index of Women, Gerstler writes about grief—that shaken, artless condition in which the dead leave the living. Long before they are promoted to the ranks of “ancestors”—the keepers of wisdom, the writers of indices—these spirits are mothers, fathers, friends, lovers. Here, Gerstler keeps the lines of communication open so these figures might remain among the living. In “Furniture,” the speaker’s parents benignly haunt a pair of fake leather armchairs: “When no one’s home, / I sit in the living room, in one of their laps, / and tell them my troubles and small joys.” In “Conference with the Dead,” the departed demand a meeting with the left-behind to air their grievances for the foolishness with which we treat the earth (“Whose world is it? / they gasped at last. Can’t we return / and share the earth? We signaled that / this could not be. Their time was up. / They’d had their chance. The world was ours, / and they were dirt.”). “Poof” is a gut-wrenching goodbye to a former high school confidante in which Gerstler, her friend’s Ziplocked ashes in hand, imagines a gesture of thanks for their wild and beautiful years together:

In this fiction, I roll down the window, drive
uncharacteristically fast. I tear your baggie
open with my teeth and release you at 85
miles an hour, music cranked up full blast.

Life can crush even the most deep-feeling among us, yet it is often gutting loss that leaves us craving more life. As Gerstler marvels in “Happy Hour”:

How unchastely
grateful, how shaken by
life-thirst and yearning
this world has made me.

Gerstler’s poetry swipes against mere types by routing attention to the details that make any person singular, vivid, and true. This collection lifts up rot and ash, breastmilk and genital fluids, germs and spermicides; it monumentalizes doubt, fury, ache, and appetite; it renders mortals in all of their disquieting dimensions. The gift of Index of Women, incomplete by nature and by necessity, is that it offers writing not only as a means to record, but as a way to make room.