What I Can't Bear Losing: Essays by Gerald Stern

(Paperback, First Trade Paper Edition)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Gerald Sterns poetry has been variously praised for its visionary quality, its scope and passion, but most especially for its wholehearted embrace of life. Sterns special manner of joie de vivre is immediately evident in his prose pieces as well. In this collection of personal essays, Stern speaks to the reader on subjects closest to his heart family, justice, Jewishness, ecstasy, loss, and love, as well as Andy Warhol, Paris, and getting shot in the neck. He ranges from passionate literary discussions to buoyant anecdotes about "borrowing" William Carlos Williams hat from the writers historic home. With seven new pieces, What I Cant Bear Losing celebrates a writer passionately engaged with life in America after World War II and gives a glimpse of the poetic processes of one of todays most beloved literary voices.

Reviews

"National Book Award-winning poet Stern brings the same renowned voice to prose, from a life that began in 1925 in what he recalls as the 'Calvinist' Pittsburgh of his immigrant Russian parents." -- Kirkus Review

"Stern offers ravishingly poetic inquiries into everything from the Jewish Sabbath to the tree of life to love, posing crucial questions of forgiveness and charity. Not only did Stern become a poet against all odds, he has remained a warrior, a seeker, and a writer of conscience." -- Booklist

Author Bio

Gerald Stern's recent books of poetry are Divine Nothingness, In Beauty Bright, Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992, Save the Last Dance, This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award, Odd Mercy, and Bread without Sugar. His honors include the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Award, the Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Prize, four National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pennsylvania Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from the American Poetry Review, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2005 Stern received the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry. For many years a teacher at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Stern lives in Lambertville, NJ.