Book Review: Is This My Final Form? by Amy Gerstler
Reviewed by Fiona Hartmann
Image from Fujiphilm.
Is This My Final Form?
Amy Gerstler. New York: Penguin Books, 2025. 96 pages. $20.00.
Is This My Final Form? by Amy Gerstler.
Penguin Books, 2025.
The prologue poem of Amy Gerstler’s Is This My Final Form? (Penguin Books, 2025) might form an answer to the title’s question. The poem “When I was a bird,” has the speaker describing an idyllic life as a bird, existing among nature. There is peaceful coexistence with other animals, and an offered glimpse of the differences. She writes how “the best parts / about being a bird were absence of shame.” Humans are the evolved form of great apes, but there is a wonder of what has been lost through this process, and what has led to a longing to devolve back to our primal roots. Gerstler offers a collection of bodies and being disembodied, through an exploration of beings that have been “othered,” either through the process of societal judgment, or how they are fictional, fantastical conjurations. Woven throughout the poems is the theme of metamorphosis, of longing to transform and be made into something else due to perceived imperfections. The at times tongue-in-cheek tone allows for a sharp critique of contemporary society through its absurdist mentions, particularly those that encapsulate the pandemic experience, which feel all too familiar and plausible to us. Gerstler searches through the different imagined skins to try to find one that she feels comfortable in. How we are all searching to find our “final form” that is a safe home for our personal trials and a shield to society’s shame. In the bodies of others, Gerstler tries to find herself.
Gerstler sees beauty in monsters and renegades, creating named homages to two in particular. The first poem is “The Bride of Frankenstein,” which opens with, “I glimpse my ideal woman.” The speaker sees in this horrific creation perfection rather than a monster. The speaker goes on to explain the paradoxical state that is alluring, stating how the creature “manages to channel both startled newborn / and enraged, caged predator.” These are both states where a person is unchained from shame. A newborn is innocent and pure and cannot conceive of shame, while a predator has no concern for the opinion of others.
The second poem is “Mae West Sonnet,” about the prominent actress who was a sex symbol in classic American cinema. This piece also continues the strand that runs from the beginning of the collection, citing that the actress was “virtue severed from gender / she soon got over being ashamed.” This pair of poems features women whose personas were self-inventions that ran counter to society’s norms. They lived unashamed, a dream that the speaker of the first poem imagines only possible in the form of a bird.
There are familiar mythologies featured throughout the collection, both Christian and otherwise. “Siren Island,” which labels itself as a ten-minute play, presents a cast of characters who are described as sirens, figures derived most famously from Greek mythology. They all live on an island, a purgatory of the dead, and, we learn, have all committed suicide. On this island, they have found a place where other people understand the feeling of how their sorrow had become too big for their bodies. Among other suffering souls, there is a creation of a found family, prompting the question of whether this purgatory instead feels more like heaven.
“Voicemail from Satan” features the devil as the speaker, leaving a voicemail in the familiar tone of an ill-advised hook-up from the past, except that the lines themselves veer into the fantastical and the violent. But there is an almost fondness in the voice: “I’m gonna gnaw you / into pleasing shapes. You can deface me too.” There is a hunger by the devil to reshape the object of his desire into what is alluring him, but a reciprocal offer is also presented. This temptation is peculiarly fair in a world where the expectation to change is rarely mutual. Gerstler once again reframes another familiar monster to us in a new, sympathetic light, asking us to question the judgment of what society asks us to shun and vilify. The participation in shaming is culturally embedded within the Christian ethos, beginning right from Eden. Gerstler suggests we might need to look for another paradise to find peace away from the pervasiveness of one’s existence being considered wrong.
“Having checked the Egyptian Book of the Dead out of the library,” is a piece that weaves through the mythology of the Egyptian underworld. The speaker says how the departed soul can “take the shapes of its desires,” the tragedy of how it can only remake itself in death, how it never could in life. Furthermore, this is a place where the soul shines “in the right light, when seen by the right eyes.” In this afterlife, the soul may find the eyes that see it as beautiful. A small measure of justice can be issued by the speaker, who can finally judge the eyes of society as being the ones that were “wrong.”
Gerstler’s book is a collection of bodies, dead and alive, fictional and real, that exemplify the multitude of ways a body, particularly a female one, can be deemed wrong by society, both through the criteria of conventional attractiveness and the implied virtue of demeanor. The poems are preoccupied with the body politics of longing to transform into a perfect form that will not draw criticism. The poet searches in heaven, hell, and limbo for a place of acceptance where the question of Is This My Final Form? can be answered with a yes of relief; that there is no further need to continue searching for another form to transform into. But despite the extensive search, no definitive answer of such a place can be found, then perhaps it becomes a question of whether each of us must make such a place within our own body. So long as we exist to seek the judgment of others, we will find it, but not if we create our own self-acceptance.
Fiona Hartmann is a writer living in Toronto, Canada. She is interested in creating thought-provoking fiction that creates emotional connections that transcend through the digital landscape of modernity. She is a 2025 Lucky Jefferson Poetry Finalist. Find her published work in Lucky Jefferson, Poetry Pause, Juste Milieu Zine, and at www.fionahartmann.com
