Galaxy Love: Poems - Softcover

Gerald Stern is the author of nineteen volumes of poetry. He has been awarded the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Robert Frost Medal, among many other honors. He lives in New York City.

“What a voice, what a bardic roll. [Gerald Stern’s] poetry is a lifelong act of love.”
- John Timpane, Philadelphia Inquirer

“[Stern] has settled into a serenity reminiscent of his old master Whitman.... [But] the old appetite is still on duty.... In every overcaffeinated and rumbustious line, Gerald Stern has been telling us that the best way to live is not so much for poetry but through poetry, and he underlines that idea here again in Galaxy Love.”
- David Kirby, New York Times Book Review

“In Galaxy Love, [Stern] is nostalgic, expansive, intellectual, silly, serious, homespun, highfalutin―sometimes all at once.... His perspective, and his way of accessing religious, political, and literary history, have earned him a place among great American poets.”
- Lucy Biederman, Jewish Book Council

“Stern is... absolutely necessary to living.”
- John Repp, Erie Reader

“[Gerald] Stern is nearly 92 and still producing poetry that exudes a keen awareness of the strangeness of age.”
- Tayla Zax, Forward

“Poetry-talk is [Stern’s] gift; with the spirit and intent of the poetry gods.”
- Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books

“Thoughtful narrative recollections from and about the poet himself.”
- Library Journal

“There has never been a poet like Gerald Stern, who likes to shake things and empty them out, and then share what’s found with the entire congregation. Sorrow and exultation get their equal turn, but it’s the human imagination and all its jubilant fecundity that’s paid special attention. Whether it’s a fistfight between Stevens and Hemingway (‘Who punched whom’) or Tolstoy dying unsweetened, what’s offered is nothing less than an excursion into the soul, where, as we all know, one finds love for the galaxy, at least one goat sucker, and a wild canary. I didn’t know until the last page how famished I was, how in need of a feast.”
- Philip Schultz, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Luxury