Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella

A duet that spans the years, Christian Anton Gerard's WILMOT HERE, COLLECT FOR STELLA brings all the joyous, bitter, and mundane moments of a lifetime spent together.

"Chronology be damned. Say the most notorious Libertine of Restoration England places a phone call to the reigning mistress of Petrarchan address a century earlier. Say she's his long-suffering wife. Does she accept the charges? You'd better hope so; you'll miss a whole world of exorbitant fun if she does not. These poems are as gorgeous a romp as wit and irreverence and masterful craft can make. A jazz musician's timing, imagination hungry as the ocean and, behind the alter egos and their buffetings, a mind of tempered kindness and a heart for grown-up love. This is a ravishing debut." - Linda Gregerson

"Funny, absurd, rollicking, whimsically allusive and sophisticated, WILMOT HERE, COLLECT FOR STELLA is a requited version of Astrophil & Stella and in its literary and cultural mash-ups and marital misprisons is something like 'The Honeymooners' meets 'The Courtier'." - Michael Collier

"Christian Anton Gerard's debut collection enacts the obsessive psychological scaffolding of Sidney's Astrophil & Stella-though not the sonnet sequence's form-in these slyly post-confessional lyrics that dramatize the troubled love of the personae Wilmot and Stella. Gerard's self-reflexive 'he said/she said' dialogic structure frames the bracing self-interrogations of Wilmot, haunted variously by his marital infidelity, paternal legacies, and vexing adolescence. Between Wilmot and Stella, and within Gerard's fraught and intimate poems, the 'Ghosts keep us moving.'" - Anna Journey