The Preacher’s a poem with polyphonic voices, enormous range, and many of Stern’s familiar icons: his animism, his city grit, his philosophical fragments, his irony and justice quest, his reaching for the strain of memory. –Ira Sadoff

Gerald Stern is the author of fourteen poetry books, including This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 National Book Award. He taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fifteen years, and he is the recipient of many awards, including the Lamont Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the National Jewish Book Award for poetry.