I.

"Praise for Gerald Stern ""Stern is a romantic with a sense of humor . . . a sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary."" --Edward Hirsch ""[Stern is] the wilderness in American poetry."" --Stanley Kunitz ""His work derides provincialism and points to a world of experiences beyond American borders and transcendent of temporal limits. Stern has lived in this rich world, and his poetry calls attention to its failures, beauties, and curiosities without fear, shame, or sentimentality."" --Jeffrey Dodd, Elise Gregory, and Adam O'Connor Rodriguez in Willow Springs ""[Stern is] a post-nuclear, multicultural Whitman for the millennium--the U.S.'s one and only truly global poet."" --Kate Daniels in the Southern Review (1998) ""I. is vintage Gerald Stern, and it epitomizes his glorious career. 'A continuation . . . a crazy footnote . . . a weird midrash'--that's the Jewish poetry that has always mattered and what this truly (look it up) berserk and tender prophecy brings us so movingly now. All hail Stern's I, period!"" --Peter Cole, author of Draw Me After: Poems ""I. is a book-length vortex. From various locales on New York's Lower East Side, the poet, I mean I., reflects on the likes of Abraham, Dickinson, Cervantes, Fats Waller. He considers words such as 'pelican, ' he conjures crimes such as oil spills, he mentions a 'room for affection, ' he brings up the 'pellucid distinctness of objects' and cites passages, so to speak, in Exodus. I. investigates and observes. And, as with much of Stern's poetry, observation is both profane and sacred. Within a tumult of images from God-knows-where and language that upsets both the cart and carter, I. beckons. Stern delivers."" --Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies"