Forrest Gander

1997 Winner in
Poetry

A writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert. He taught at Harvard University and then Brown University where he was the AK Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature. He's the recipient of The Pulitzer Prize, Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, Guggenheim, and US Artists foundations. His books of poetry and fiction, often concerned with ecology and intimacy, include Be With, The Trace, and Twice Alive. His book with John Kinsella, Redstart: an Ecological Poetics, is frequently cited by scholars and writers in reference to “eco-poetics.” Gander’s many translations include Alice Iris Red Horse: Poems by Gozo Yoshimasu and Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems. Gander was married to the late poet CD Wright with whom he has a son, the artist Brecht Wright Gander. He lives in CA with the sculptor Ashwini Bhat.

Photo Credit:
Nina Subin
Reviews & Praise

“Gander has always been an innovative poet, and one deeply concerned with the events, and languages, beyond America’s borders. In this, certainly his most accessible, and possibly his most powerful, book, he brings the world’s frightening and beautiful strangeness far beyond the edge of the page.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Critical Mass [on Core Samples from the World]

“It isn’t long before the ethereal quality of these poems begins to remind you of similar effects in the work of T. S. Eliot and the 17th century Anglo-Welsh mystic Henry Vaughan . . . The voices vary throughout this book’s six highly speculative sequences . . . yet again and again they call from their spectral airiness a single recurring image, an elemental configuration of man, woman and child. Indeed the book ends with a consideration of just such a threesome frozen forever in the aftermath of an earthquake on ancient Cyprus, with the speaker proposing that such a piteous sight can be taken as either a story with no meaning or a meaning beyond story. In the midst of such questioning, the only reality is the poet’s unflinchingly curious mind.” —David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review [on Torn Awake]

"Forrest Gander is a Southern poet of a relatively rare kind, a restlessly experimental writer. Science & Steepleflower is his fourth book and perhaps his best. Be ready for a ride. It is a strange melange of pungent, physical detail, scraps of geological and evolutionary science, oddly erotic images, and almost surreally exact bits of description: a poet moving through words, through time, in a way that seems at once precise and hallucinatory." —Robert Hass, The Washington Post Book World

Selected Works

Mojave Ghost
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Outside Links
Interview (Cordite Poetry Review)
Various Sound Recordings (PennSound)
Poetry Readings (WPR Audio Archive)