Powerful, mind-blowing, devastatingly profound, Forrest Gander is among the most extraordinary poets of North American poetry and of the poetry of our time.

Raúl Zurita

Mojave Ghost, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Forrest Gander, is a “a novel poem,” taking us to his birthplace in the Mojave Desert and his current northern California home, where tumultuous memories coalesce with the present

Mojave Ghost

Poetry by Forrest Gander

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.

Paperback

published: Oct, 01 2024

ISBN:
978-0-8112-3795-6
Price U.S.:
15.95
Trim Size:
5x8
Page Count:
80

Ebook

published: Oct, 01 2024

ISBN:
9780811237963
Portrait of Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander

American poet, novelist, and translator

Powerful, mind-blowing, devastatingly profound, Forrest Gander is among the most extraordinary poets of North American poetry and of the poetry of our time.

Raúl Zurita

Restlessly experimental, precise and hallucinatory.

Washington Post

Gander’s verses have a shattering, symphonic quality.

Tess Taylor, The New York Times

These meditations on time themselves unfold in time. Gander shifts perspective from one poem to another. Sometimes, he speaks in the first person and sometimes in the third, as if the self he is writing about belonged to someone else.…The varied verse forms and shifting points of view in these poems imply that our ways of being with each other are mobile and situational, bound by time, and yet are also transcending it.

Langdon Hammer

Slender and splendid.

Maria Popova, The Marginalian

Expansive and arresting… a book-length single poem that spans time, space, and narrative perspective against stark and arresting desert environments... Readers will be wowed.

Publishers Weekly (starred)

As tangible as they come, these are poems that periscope into moments. Not only do they call attention to the art of paying attention; they play host to an understated mysticism that binds to everything it touches, invoking what sometimes seems to be an accidental ethic of generosity . . . An elaboration of the American Southwest from a poet with the vision to see a world in each of its grains of sand, Mojave Ghost is that rare thing—a book of poems with something new to say about love.

Eric Bies, North American Review

Mojave Ghost builds an ecosystem of people and memories, places in time, expressions of love, as the various figures and objects can only live in the context of each other . . . [A]s Mojave Ghost crosses and recrosses its self-made borders, a new kind of experience is being made and measured.

Christian Wessels Los Angeles Review of Books

Haunting and spiritual, Gander’s newest collection compels us to look at our connections to land and memory with tender, open eyes.

Turi Sioson Only Poems

An excavation of interior geography, of the faults and rift zones of its author’s psyche, his history and memory . . . In this magnificent and nuanced work, [Gander] wrestles with the most complicated and contradictory of human experiences: the implacable inevitability of our evanescence, the fallacy of memory, and the failure of time to redeem us, to offer consolation of any kind

David L. Ulin, Alta Journal

[Gander's] sense of the line is as strong as any poet’s since Ezra Pound and his ability to mingle abstract and concrete notions to link the world of the mind with the world of deserts and Gila monsters would please Wallace Stevens.

William Doreski, The Adroit Journal

A compelling concoction of ecopoetic wonder, filled to the brim with insights into the inner workings of a speaker forever in longing after having longed, and loving after having loved—and having been loved.

Andrew Jones, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost is a book to read and reread. You’ll want to return to it for the ways it loosens narrative, for its many voices / perspectives, for its open form, and for the immersion in the warm affection between the speaker and his wife—as well as for the gorgeous and crystal-clear images which are a hallmark of this poet’s work.

Laura Mullen, California Review of Books

Erotic devotion, grief and rapt observation alternate and triangulate and recur, just as "the lake’s small waves/go on wringing themselves out in the sand." An accretive, startlingly experienced, wise and finally hopeful book.

Stephanie Burt, The London Review of Books