Death Watch

Gerald Stern, National Book Award-winning poet, creates a powerful new prose book in his ninth decades, as he contemplates mortality. In his characteristic audacious, uncompromising, funny, and iconoclastic style, Stern looks back at his life and forward to how he will end his days.

Will he be cremated—against the tenets of Judaism—or buried, and if buried where? He visits synagogues to find answ...