Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander Poems

Forrest Gander Biography

Forrest Gander (born 1956) is an American poet, essayist, novelist, critic, and translator. Born in the Mojave Desert, he grew up in Virginia and has degrees in geology, a subject referenced frequently in both his poems and essays, and English literature. He spent significant periods in San Francisco, California, Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico, and Eureka Springs, Arkansas, before moving to Providence, Rhode Island. A writer in multiple genres, Gander is noted for his collaborations with photographers such as Sally Mann and Graciela Iturbide and with the dancers Eiko & Koma. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and the recipient of fellowships from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Whiting Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. He is the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literatures at Brown University in Rhode Island. His poetry is lyrical and often complex rhythmically and structurally. Critic Karla Huston, writing in "Library Journal," notes that, "Owing to the poems' placement on the page and the near absence of punctuation, the reader is propelled through the verse, left with a sense of urgency and awe." Noting the frequency and particularity of Gander's references to ecology and landscape, Robert Hass, former U.S. Poet Laureate, calls him "a Southern poet of a relatively rare kind, a restlessly experimental writer." Gander's book Core Samples from the World was a finalist for 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award. The Pulitzer citation notes that Core Samples from the World is "A compelling work that explores cross-cultural tensions in the world and digs deeply to identify what is essential in human experience." The subjects of Gander's formally innovative essays range from snapping turtles to translation to literary hoaxes. His critical essays have appeared in The Nation, Boston Review, and The New York Times Book Review. In 2008, New Directions published As a Friend, Gander's novel of a gifted man, a land surveyor, whose impact on those around him provokes an atmosphere of intense self-examination and eroticism. In The New York Times Book Review, Jeanette Winterson praised As a Friend as "a strange and beautiful novel.... haunting and haunted." It needs, she wrote, "to be read slowly, to be uncovered like a secret or discovered like a treasure." It has been published in translation in Bulgarian, Spanish, French, and German editions. Gander is a translator with a particular interest in poetry from Spain, Latin America, and Japan. Besides editing two anthologies of Mexican poetry, Gander has translated discrete volumes by Mexican poets Pura López Colomé, Coral Bracho (PEN Translation Finalist for "Firefly Under the Tongue"), and [3] Alfonso D'Aquino. With Kyoko Yoshida, Gander translated Spectacle & Pigsty: Selected Poems of Kiwao Nomura (OmniDawn, 2011), winner of the 2012 Best Translated Book Award. The second book of his translations, with Kent Johnson, of Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz, The Night (Princeton, 2007), received a PEN Translation Award. Gander's critically acclaimed translations of the Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda are included in The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems (City Lights, 2004))

The Best Poem Of Forrest Gander

The Ark Upon His Shoulders

My husband did all this.We used to live
in a rambling kind of house with gossipy verandas.
Then he bought a stove, an iron stovewith a reservoir to it.
He always insisted it was bad luckto come in that door
and go out the other. It's bad luck to pay back salt
if you borrow it.To the day he died
he smelled pulled up from the dirt. He worked
the Norfolk Southern forty years walking on top
of freight trains. I've seen him up there
and the wind just blowing--you could see the wind
blowing his clothes.
Our second househe built it.
Cut me a yard broom from dogwood bushes,
tied in three places. Hogs squealed under the floorboards
in winter--you could see onethrough the cracks.
He had something he said to hush them.
Come up the porch stepsarms full of lightwood.
In those dayswe drank good old cool water
out of the well--cool and put some syrup in it
and stir it up and drink it right along
with our dinner. The summers wereso hot you saw
little devilstwizzling out in front of you.
He called themlazy jacks. It was the heat.
Listen at that bird,he'd say. It's telling us,
Love one another. He caughta ride back
from town with seeds and a hoopof greasy cheese and crackers and
sardines and lightbread. He carried that umbrella
over me and Iwould have his hat walking to church.
We lost the first one.The midwife came late, she used dirt-
dauber tea for my pains.He tried telling me
it wasn't any death owl, it was a ordinary hoot owl outside
the house. But I tied a knot in my sheet
so it wouldn't quiver.I was in such trouble,
he petted me a lot. Three dayslabor he attended me
how a dragonfly hoversover water in the clear sun.
The next year we had a beautifulgirl baby, Ruthie.
Ruthie, after my mother. Towards the end,
he was a bit thick-listed.I never yelled though, he read my lips.
When the katydidchirps, I miss him
saying there'll be forty days until frost. Ones who were in trouble
they always sought him out. Listen
at that bird, he'd say.
The things he knew how to do he did them.

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