One of Gerstler's earliest collections, Bitter Angel is marked by her familiar sense of play in nightmarish and macabre landscapes. Her style generates great imagery that is by turns haunting and clever. Her poems undercut an expected gravity in favor of a dark and destabilizing playfulness, though a few a lines here sorely lacked gravity or humor in favor of abstraction. The frequent transitions between verse and prose poetry sometimes disrupt the movement of the collection. ( )