Nerve Storm

Nerve Storm is easily as fine a collection of poems as Gerstler's last collection, the award-winning Bitter Angel. Her images are surprising and evocative; for example, in her poem "A Hypochondriac's Account of Herself," she writes, "I have a pain in my lower back the exact size and shape of a butterfly"; and her poem "Petition" begins, "That slightly curdled ration of morning milk, handed to you in a dented tin cup: that was me." In another poem she writes a letter to "the rage management supervisor." Harper's magazine will run her poem, "Modern Madonnas" in their April 1993 issue.