Be With

by Forrest Gander

Overview

WINNER OF THE 2019 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Book of 2018

Forrest Gander’s first book of poems since his Pulitzer finalist Core Samples from the World: a startling look through loss, grief, and regret into the exquisite nature of intimacy

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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811226059
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	08/28/2018
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	653,174
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

…[a] plangent, thrumming recent collection…In many ways, the book's focus is strikingly inward, showing how grief sounds in the body, mapping paths, making previously hidden regions visible. In another sense, Gander's poems are public howls that trace a luminous borderland where the self dissolves into the world…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. "Poetry is more a threshold than a path," Seamus Heaney once wrote, also during challenging political times. In this book, Gander's poems are like rich Möbius strips, entrances and exits at once, tunnels that simultaneously displace us and gather us up, drawing us into a profound human longing. There are dazzling fragments, unraveling syntax, poems that, in their ghostliness, also force us to be alert to our own fragile lives.

The New York Times Book Review - Tess Taylor

★ 10/01/2018
“Life feels life in language,” writes Gander in this searing collection, his first since the Pulitzer Prize–finalist Core Samples from the World. In the depths of grief, Gander conceives of “a realm more real than life./ At which point there was at least some possibility.” Throughout, he traverses literal and figurative boundaries, probing language’s limits in regards to aging, loss, and violence. Among the most moving of Gander’s explorations is that of the space between absence and a presence foregrounded by dementia. In “Ruth,” Gander tenderly witnesses this condition’s effects in and on language: “To listen to each repetition with renewed attentiveness as if it were/ the first occasion, to forget you’ve heard it before and to receive her/ words as her first words or her last ones, for she repeats things not/ only because she’s forgotten but also so they will be remembered.” Violence often cannot be adequately rendered in a single language, as he shows in “Evaporación: A Border History,” with its blend of English and Spanish. “En los dos lados del pavimiento, magnetic sensors/ registran movimiento y dirección. Evening/ cicadas eclipse tree crickets,” he writes. Life, death, and every minor phenomenon in between feels more vivid in Gander’s heartbreaking work: “You who were given a life, what did you make of it?” (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"A complex reading experience punctuated by intense beauty."

Washington Post Book World

"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

"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."

The Best Books of 2018 - Commonweal - Anthony Domestico

"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

"Gander does not turn away from grief but dives into its awful and cathartic cascading beauty that wavers between gravity and weightlessness."

Arkansas International

"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."

NPR - Craig Morgan Teicher

"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."

The New Yorker - Dan Chiasson