What I Can't Bear Losing
Essays by Gerald Stern
Gerald Stern’s poetry has been variously praised for its visionary quality, its scope and passion, but most especially for its wholehearted embrace of life. Stern’s 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 writer’s historic home. With seven new pieces, What I Can’t 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 today’s most beloved literary voices.
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.
