Forrest Gander

What is an ethical life? An erotic life? A life underpinned by awe? By grief? What is it to recognize oneself as comprised of others, human and not? What hasn’t this poet lavished his “gorgeous attention” on? Gathered from forty years of published books, the Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Forrest Gander’s Dune Lines offers such poignance—of tenderness, tragedy, phenomenological inquiry, and the almost sustaining particularities of love. His poems are worldly in scale, but intimate in scope, fusing geological and human time. Dune Lines contains a wide-ranging selection of many of Gander’s best-loved poems, revealing how he has charted his utterly distinctive course in contemporary poetry.

Mojave Ghost initiates an unusually tender bond with the reader as it chronicles an intimate relationship with arresting honesty and vividness. Moving through grief and loss towards a renewal that never sidesteps the wholeness of experience, Gander’s new collection discovers an articulate language for the merging of exterior and interior landscapes. Gander, trained as a geologist, walked along much of the 800-mile San Andreas Fault toward the desolate town of his birth and found himself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating his emotions and the stricken landscape with other divisions: the fractures and folds underlying not only our country, but any self in its relationship with others. The result is this moving new collection that unforgettably describes a spiritual and physical journey. With its confiding tones and candid self-examination, Mojave Ghost is Gander’s most inviting and poignant book yet.

In the searing poems of his new collection, Twice Alive, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Forrest Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and his immersion in Sangam literary traditions, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illuminates our deep-tangled interrelations.

While conducting fieldwork with a celebrated mycologist, Gander links human intimacy with the transformative collaborations between species that compose lichens. Throughout Twice Alive, Gander addresses personal and ecological trauma—several poems focus on the devastation wrought by wildfires in California, where he lives—but his tone is overwhelmingly celebratory. Twice Alive is a book charged with exultation and tenderness.

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

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.”

The Trace is Forrest Gander’s new masterful, poetic novel about a road trip through Mexico. After a devastating incident involving their adolescent son, a couple embark upon a trip through the vast Chihuahua Desert. They retrace the steps of Ambrose Bierce and try to piece their lives back together. With tender precision, Gander explores the intimacy as they travel through towns and picturesque canyons on a journey through the heart of the Mexican desert. After taking a short-cut through the brutally hot countryside, their car overheats miles from nowhere with terrible consequences. . . .

For over thirty years, Eiko & Koma, the Japanese-born choreographers and dancers, have created an influential theatre of movement out of stillness, shape, light, and sound. In tribute and collaboration, the acclaimed American poet Forrest Gander has written a mesmerizing series of poems — hinging around a dance schematic — that captures and extends the dancers’ performance with lyrical intensity and vividness.

Two larval bodies naked with faces and seared straw in their hair hold our looking to the dark back of and beyond

In March of 2013 we launched a new series of Poetry Pamphlets, a reincarnated version of the “Poet of the Month” and “Poets of the Year” series James Laughlin published in the 1940s, which brought out such eclectic hits as William Carlos Williams’s The Broken Span, Delmore Schwartz’s poetic play Shenandoah, John Donne’s Some Poems and a Devotion, and Yvor Winters’s Giant Weapon, among many others. The New Directions Poetry Pamphlets will highlight original work by writers from around the world, as well as forgotten treasures lost in the cracks of literary history. (More information on the first set can be found here.)

Included in this set of four are:

The Beautiful Contradictions by Nathaniel Tarn

Vale Ave by H. D.

_A Musical Hell _by Alejanda Pizarnik

Eiko & Koma by Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander’s Core Samples from the World is a magnificent compendium of poetry, photography, and essay (a form of Japanese haibun). Collaborating with three acclaimed photographers, Gander explores tensions between the familiar and foreign. His eloquent new work voices an ethical concern for others, exploring empathic relations in which the world itself is fundamental. Taking us around the globe to China, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Chile, Core Samples shows how Gander’s “sharp sense of place has made him the most earthly of our avant-garde, the best geographer of fleshly sites since Olson” (Donald Revell, The Colorado Review). 20 black-and-white photographs

Set in a rural landscape as vivid as its characters, As a Friend tells the story of a gifted young man, a land surveyor, whose impact on those around him provokes intense self-examination and charged eroticism. With poetic insight, Gander explores the nature of attraction, betrayal, and loyalty. Beautifully written and suffused with a pastoral nostalgia, As a Friend is brilliant in style and unsettling.

The three long poems in Eye Against Eye convey the wrought particulars of intimate human relations, perceptions of the landscape, and the historical moment, tense with political exigencies. Mayan ruins invoke the collapsing Twin Towers, love between parents and child blisters with tension, and a bicycle thief shatters the narcotic illusion of a private accord. Also contained is “Late Summer Entry,” a series of poetic commentaries on Sally Mann’s landscape photographs. Eye Against Eye, Forrest Gander’s third book with New Directions, cries out an ethical concern for the ways we see each other and the world, the potential to share a vision that acknowledges our commonality. As always with Gander’s poetry, suspensions and repetitions drive toward a complex emotional experience, evoking the multifaceted, multi-vocal surge of our present.

Three years ago, New Directions published Forrest Gander’s Science & Steepleflower, and it received unanimous, widespread praise. “A major book,” said The Chicago Review. “Gander … utilizes the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane,” said The Boston Review. “Gander’s is a lyrical and rigorous aesthetic” (Publishers Weekly). In his new collection Torn Awake, Gander continues to blend passion with intelligence. He unveils the forces of physical nature, but also those of personhood: the self as a construction of reciprocally reflective relations. Each of the book’s major sequences develops a unique subject, rhythm, and form, bringing to light the molten potential at the core of personality. Additionally, the poems illuminate ways that language––as history read by anthropologists, discourse between lovers, graffiti in temples, or even language as an event in itself––incarnates presence. Addressing father and son relationships, and venerating erotic love, Gander’s poems surge with vitality, the energy of active discovery. “A sound master… Eros presides over his generous poems that ring with the wondrous names of lowly things” (Village Voice Literary Supplement).

Science & Steepleflower is a breakthrough book for Forrest Gander, a poet whose richness of language and undaunted lyric passion land him in traditions running from Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Duncan and Michael Ondaatje. His poetry has been called “desperately beautiful” by Thom Gunn, and “original and fascinating” by John Ashbery. With poems in the leading journals of the day––American Poetry Review, Grand Street, Sulfur, and Conjunctions, to name just a few––Gander plumbs the erotic depths of human interaction with the land. The poems in Science & Steepflower test this relationship with what Publishers Weekly has called “an inbred (and often haunting) spirituality,” bringing us to new vistas of linguistic and perceptive grace.

It Must Be a Misunderstanding is the acclaimed Mexican poet Coral Bracho’s most personal and emotive collection to date, dedicated to her mother who died of complications from Alzheimer’s. Remarkably, Bracho, author and daughter, seems to disappear into her own empathic observations as her mother comes clear to us not as a tragic figure, but as a fiery and independent personality. The chemistry between them is vivid, poignant, and unforgettable. As the translator Forrest Gander explains in his foreword: the book’s force builds as the poems cycle through their sequences— from early to late Alzheimer’s—“with non-judgmental affection and compassionate watchfulness.”

Yoshimasu Gozo’s groundbreaking poetry has spanned over half a century since the publication of his first book, Departure, in 1964. Much of his work is highly unorthodox: it challenges the print medium and language itself, and consequently Alice Iris Red Horse is as much a book on translation as it is a book in translation. Since the late ’60s, Gozo has collaborated with visual artists and free-jazz musicians. In the 1980s he began creating art objects engraved on copper plates and later produced photographs and video works. Alice Iris Red Horse contains translations of Gozo’s major poems, representing his entire career. Also included are illuminating interviews, reproductions of Gozo’s artworks, and photographs of his performances.Translated by Jeffrey Angles, Richard Arno, Forrest Gander, Derek Gromadzki, Sawako Nakayasu, Sayuri Okamoto, Hiroaki Sato, Eric Selland, Auston Stewart, Kyoko Yoshida, and Jordan A. Y. Smith. Introduction and notes by Derek Gromadzki. Edited by Forrest Gander.

Download “A Note on the Notes” and notes on the poems.

It Must Be a Misunderstanding is the acclaimed Mexican poet Coral Bracho’s most personal and emotive collection to date, dedicated to her mother who died of complications from Alzheimer’s. Remarkably, Bracho, author and daughter, seems to disappear into her own empathic observations as her mother comes clear to us not as a tragic figure, but as a fiery and independent personality. The chemistry between them is vivid, poignant, and unforgettable. As the translator Forrest Gander explains in his foreword: the book’s force builds as the poems cycle through their sequences— from early to late Alzheimer’s—“with non-judgmental affection and compassionate watchfulness.”

The Galloping Hour: French Poems—never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime—gathers for the first time all the poems that Alejandra Pizarnik (revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolaño) wrote in French. Conceived during her Paris sojourn (1960–1964) and in Buenos Aires (1970–1971) near the end of her tragically short life, these poems explore many of Pizarnik’s deepest obsessions: the limitations of language, silence, the body, night, sex, and the nature of intimacy.

Drawing from personal life experiences and echoing readings of some of her beloved/accursed French authors—Charles Baudelaire, Germain Nouveau, Arthur Rimbaud, and Antonin Artaud—this collection includes prose poems that Pizarnik would later translate into Spanish. Pizarnik’s work led Raúl Zurita to note: “Her poetry—with a clarity that becomes piercing—illuminates the abysses of emotional sensitivity, desire, and absence. It presses against our lives and touches the most exposed, fragile, and numb parts of humanity."

Click here to see book notes by Patricio Ferrari, editor of The Galloping Hour

Born in 1951 in Mexico City, Coral Bracho has published half a dozen books of poems including the groundbreaking El ser que va a morir (1982) which changed the course of Mexican poetry. Her exquisite long-lined poems evoke the sensual realm where logic is disbanded, wonder evoked. In the words of her translator Forrest Gander, “Her diction spills out along ceaselessly shifting beds of sound…Bracho’s poems make sense first as music, and music propels them.” From her early collections–Bajo el destello liguido and El ser—to her most recent books La voluntad del ambar and Ese espacio, ese jardin (which won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize), Firefly Under the Tongue offers the first book of English translations by this most important and influential living poet