Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section-a moving transcription of Gander's efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer's-rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been
called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, "the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane."
FORREST GANDER lives in northern California and has published books of poems, translations, and essays. He has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Be With, and the Best Translated Book Award, as well as fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim Foundation, and United States Artists.
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Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section-a moving transcription of Gander's efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer's-rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been
called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, "the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane."
FORREST GANDER lives in northern California and has published books of poems, translations, and essays. He has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Be With, and the Best Translated Book Award, as well as fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim Foundation, and United States Artists.
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Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in California. He taught at Harvard University and Brown University. Gander is a translator and the author of many books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. He has received a Pulitzer Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Whiting, and United States Artists Foundations.
"Gander’s verses have a shattering, symphonic quality, but he uses
poetry to locate and dislocate at once, pushing against the borders
of meaning or pitching his camp where language estranges itself
from sense. There are dazzling fragments, unraveling syntax,
poems that, in their ghostliness, also force us to be alert to our
own fragile lives."
*Tess Taylor - New York Times Book Review*
"Be With charts the addled chronology of personal loss.
Poetry often creates a supernatural-seeming
rapport with the dead, but rarely has the communication
between worlds felt so eerily reciprocal."
*Dan Chiasson - The New Yorker*
"Life, death, and every minor phenomenon in between feels more
vivid in Gander’s heartbreaking work."
*Publishers Weekly (starred)*
"Utterly naked and bereft, elegies, apologies, could-have-beens,
Gander grieves and wonders about what's left in his
life. Reading this book may hurt, but it will help people to
keep living through what they thought they could never
survive."
*Craig Morgan Teicher - NPR*
"If Gander’s philosophical strain and flamboyant lingo suggest
Wallace Stevens, and his conversance with science and his stress on
the ‘ongoing’ recall A. R. Ammons, he insinuates a knotty,
digressive intensity that is fully his own."
*Bookforum*
"A complex reading experience punctuated by intense beauty."
*Washington Post Book World*
"Gander’s love for formal, even archaic language and the quiet
complexity of his syntax can build striking abstract landscapes in
which the material and spiritual worlds seem equally
intelligent."
*American Poetry Review*
"Written in the wake of this loss, Be With breaks form to
render Gander’s own brokenness, leaving gaps in the middle of lines
and channeling St. John of the Cross. Gander explores his own dark
night of the soul—and, as a poet particularly concerned with
ecology, the dark night of our natural world."
*Anthony Domestico - Commonweal*
"Gander does not turn away from grief but dives into its awful and
cathartic cascading beauty that wavers between gravity and
weightlessness."
*Arkansas International*
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