Ersatz Anatomy

the long version

With quick shifts of perception and startling leaps of image and emotion, Steven Sherrill’s *Ersatz Anatomy* asks the reader to encounter a shifted world that is still grounded in what we know. “‘Beyond hunger more hunger / learn to eat the emptiness,’ Steven Sherrill chants in his stunning poetry debut. Yet *Ersatz Anatomy* is full of presences of all kinds—black walnuts cracked between bricks, dead or foundering alewives, Einstein and Longinus resurrected, Drepung Tehor Monks surfacing unexpectedly in rural Pennsylvania, and the dead Christ crashing into the same world as a transformed and living Caliban. Sherrill’s poetic gifts are considerable, but it’s his imagination that opens the backdoor to the attic of the world and allows us to crawl in. As the poet unflinchingly asserts, ‘This is not an apology,’ and with that backhanded blessing we are absolved of any need to ask for forgiveness for the joy and wonder and pain these poems will bring in their reading. But one note of caution: the poet means it when he says, ‘I’ll show you everything / if you don’t stop me.’”—Todd Davis