Quotes from Amy Gerstler

I don't like scaring people off. When I tell people I'm a writer, they look kind of interested. Then I tell them that I write poetry, and they think I'm weird.

I've always liked wearing black. Hats with veils would suit me just fine.

Only recently have I realized that being different is not something you want to hide or squelch or suppress.

With contemporary poetry having approximately as many fans outside the immediate field as there are devotees of undergoing knee surgery, any sentient, breathing reader who's genuinely interested in poetry... not scared of it... seems a godsend.

I think part of being human is learning to roll with the punches, to deal with any kind of personal or professional disaster that might crop up. You have to learn to deal with that stuff or not survive.

Film and TV are the most popular mediums in America. Literature and poetry are possibly the most under-recognized art forms.

Thin ribbons of fear snake bluely through you like a system of rivers. We need a cloudburst or soothing landscape fast, to still this panic. Maybe a field of dracaena, or a vast stand of sugar pines—generous, gum-yielding trees—to fill our minds with vegetable wonder and keep dread at bay.

Love doesn't reside in the heart, anyway. Love resides in the liver along with jaundice.

Wishin'   you were here don't place you in the old wing chair. Face you   in the photos, china, art on parlor walls. It's raining in my heart.

The throat is a road.

The human imagination can connect to practically anything.

My main ambition as a teenager was to somehow resurrect the dark-minded writer Franz Kafka and become his girlfriend.

Ideally, I'd love to write poems that intrigued humans across the board: literary folk and academics as well as... dog-walkers, doctors, plumbers, chefs, math professors, jugglers, etc.

Disaster, to me, means in some big or small way, things going wrong. And that's obviously a matter of perception, right? Let's say your puppy chewed up all the shoes in your house. She probably had a fine time doing that. In her mind, a red letter day, the highlight of her puppy life.

Like many confused and evolving humans, I live in constant danger of transformation.

I am introverted and a complete klutz.

Most people who write and publish poetry teach or do something else.

One of those quiet types who logs a lot of time in the bedlam of her head, I sometimes need to be startled awake to the fact that the outside world still exists.

There is an element in some of my work that has to do with being an outsider, feeling like not part of the dominant culture.