Presenter of
the National Book Awards
Subscribe
to our newsletter
Subscribe to our newsletter
Presenter of
the National Book Awards
Subscribe
to our newsletter
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. More about this book >
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.” More about this book >
Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and grew up, for the most part, in Virginia. Trenchant periods of his life were spent in San Francisco; Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico; and Eureka Springs, Arkansas. With degrees in both geology and English literature, Gander is the author and translator of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He is the A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University. Gander has received grants and fellowships from United States Artists and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Guggenheim, Howard, Witter Bynner, and Whiting Foundations. His collection Core Samples from the World was a National Book Critics Circle and Pulitzer Prize finalist, and his collection Be With won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was Longlisted for the National Book Award.
(Photo credit: New Directions)
no content
