“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