Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

The centerpiece of Gerald Stern's ninth collection is a long poem titled "Hot Dog," named for a beautiful street woman who lives in and around Tompkins Square Park. Other characters in this poem are St. Augustine, Walt Whitman, Noah, Gerald Stern himself, and a ninety-year-old black preacher from the Midwest. In "Hot Dog," and throughout, Stern wrestles with the issues--hope, memory, faith--that have always occupied him.

Historical events, however consequential, reduce easily to abstractions that quantify rather than qualify. Statistics, however disturbing, distance us from the responses that they should elicit. Lest we become anesthetized, we turn to fiction or poetry, to searing imagery and compression of language that crystallize for us the immeasurable elements of historic tragedy.A delicate and brave retelling of the Holocaust, The Death Mazurka rediscovers the human equation numbers assume faces in a catalog of events that dance hauntingly before us. As the most humanistic of histories, this tight cycle...

The inaugural winner of the annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award.

from "In Beauty Bright" In beauty-bright and such it was like Blake's lily and though an angel he looked absur dragging a lily out of a beauty-bright stor wrapped in tissue with a petal drooping nor was it useless--you who know it kno how useful it is--and how he would be dea in a minute if he were to lose it thoug how do you lose a lily