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2019 Pulitzer Prize winner. Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Book of 2018. Forrest Gander's first book of poems since his Pulitzer finalist Core Samples from the World: a startling look through loss, grief, and regret into the exquisite nature of intimacy.
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."
Pulitzer Prize, 2019
"Gander's love for formal, even archaic language and the quiet complexity of his syntax can build striking abstract landscapes in which the material and spiritual worlds seem equally intelligent."
- American Poetry Review
"Gander does not turn away from grief but dives into its awful and cathartic cascading beauty that wavers between gravity and weightlessness."
- Arkansas International
"If Gander's philosophical strain and flamboyant lingo suggest Wallace Stevens, and his conversance with science and his stress on the 'ongoing' recall A. R. Ammons, he insinuates a knotty, digressive intensity that is fully his own."
- Bookforum
"Written in the wake of this loss, Be With breaks form to render Gander's own brokenness, leaving gaps in the middle of lines and channeling St. John of the Cross. Gander explores his own dark night of the soul―and, as a poet particularly concerned with ecology, the dark night of our natural world."
- Anthony Domestico, Commonweal
"Gander's verses have a shattering, symphonic quality, but he uses poetry to locate and dislocate at once, pushing against the borders of meaning or pitching his camp where language estranges itself from sense. There are dazzling fragments, unraveling syntax, poems that, in their ghostliness, also force us to be alert to our own fragile lives."
- Tess Taylor, New York Times Book Review
"Utterly naked and bereft, elegies, apologies, could-have-beens, Gander grieves and wonders about what's left in his life. Reading this book may hurt, but it will help people to keep living through what they thought they could never survive."
- Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR
"Starred Review. Life, death, and every minor phenomenon in between feels more vivid in Gander's heartbreaking work." - Publishers Weekly
"Be With charts the addled chronology of personal loss. Poetry often creates a supernatural-seeming rapport with the dead, but rarely has the communication between worlds felt so eerily reciprocal."
- Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
"A complex reading experience punctuated by intense beauty." - Washington Post Book World
This information about Be With was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and grew up in Virginia. In addition to writing poetry, he has translated works by Coral Bracho, Alfonso D'Aquino, Pura Lopez-Colome, Pablo Neruda, and Jaime Saenz. The recipient of grants from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting, and United States Artists Foundations, he taught for many years as the AK Seaver Professor of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University.
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