Forest Gander
Poet, Novelist, Essayist & Translator
“Forrest Gander is a Southern poet of a relatively hard kind, a restlessly experimental writer . . . . Be ready for a ride.” —Robert Hass
“In the hands of the lyrical, insightful Forrest Gander, words express unspeakable secrets, they trace hidden connections between friends and lovers, and they make us aware of the expansive power of the imagination." —Joanna Scott
With an "unflinchingly curious mind," celebrated poet Forrest Gander has become known for the richness of his language and his undaunted lyric passion. A translator, essayist, and the editor of two anthologies of Mexican poetry, Gander is the author of more than a dozen books, including collaborations with notable artists and photographers. His many books include his gemlike first novel As A Friend (2008); the poetry collections Eye Against Eye (with photographs by Sally Mann), Torn Awake, and Science & Steepleflower; and the essay collection, Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory & Transcendence. Translations include Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho, which was the finalist for the PEN Translation Prize, and, with Kent Johnson, The Night by Jaime Saenz. Gander's essays have appeared in many national magazines including The Nation, The Boston Review, and American Poetry Review.
In 2008, Gander was named a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow, one of 50 artists to be recognized for artistic excellence, unique artistic vision, and significant contributions to their fields. Gander is also the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim, Howard, and Whiting Foundations, and he has received two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry. With poet C.D. Wright, Gander lives in Rhode Island, where he is professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University. He teaches courses on phenomenology and poetics, Asian-American literature, and translation.
About AS A FRIEND (Novel, 2008)
“Heroism is a secondary virtue,” Albert Camus noted, “but friendship is primary.” In his gemlike first novel, Forrest Gander writes of friendship, envy, and eros as a harmonic of charged overtones. Set in a rural southern landscape as vivid as its indelible characters, a friend tells the story of Les, a gifted man and land surveyor, whose impact on those around him provokes intense self-examination and an atmosphere of dangerous eroticism. With poetic insight, Gander explores the nature of attraction, betrayal, and loyalty. What he achieves is brilliant in style and powerfully unsettling.
About FIREFLY UNDER THE TONGUE: SELECTED POEMS OF CAROL BRACHO (Translation, 2008)
Born in 1951 in Mexico City, Coral Bracho has published seven books, including the groundbreaking El ser que va a morir (1982), which changed the course of Mexican poetry. The prominent Mexican poet David Heurta wrote: “The secret of Coral Bracho’s poetry, its prodigious originality, can be traced to its tendency to surge like a living voice, a silky impetuous torrent.” Coral Bracho’s poems explore the sensual realm where logic is disbanded, wonder evoked. Containing poems from all her groundbreaking collections in Spanish, Firefly under the Tongue is the first book in English by this most important and influential living poet.
About EYE AGAINST EYE (Poetry, 2005)
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.
About A FAITHFUL EXISTENCE (Essays, 2005)
A Faithful Existence is a thrilling, lyrical exploration of what it means to be faithful in the act of translation, in scientific and spiritual inquiry, in philosophies of perception, in friendship, and in poetry. Sensual, erudite, and operatic in scope, these essays pay homage to the landscape of the American South, to snapping turtles and anti-particles, to iconoclastic physicists and writers from various countries and epochs, to visionary poets and to poetic hoaxes.
Forrest Gander pops the hood of the standard-issue essay and hotwires it for the 21st century, re-tuning compelling associations and vivid bursts of insight into the quality of immediate experience. He connects with an ethical vision, a bodily consciousness, and a mode of language that might help us to survive the streams of data, the discombobulating media, and the predatory march of "information" that defines our age.
