Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander at the 2014 Texas Book Festival, Austin Texas, United States.

Forrest Gander (born 1956) is an American poet, essayist, novelist, critic, and translator.

Born in the Mojave Desert, he grew up in Virginia and traveled intensively; he has degrees in geology, a subject referenced frequently in both his poems and essays, and in English literature. His writing has been linked to ecopoetics, ecology, and intersubjectivity. A writer in multiple genres, Gander is noted for his collaborations with photographers Sally Mann and Graciela Iturbide, dancers Eiko & Koma, ceramic artist Ashwini Bhat, and painter Tjibbe Hooghiemstra, among many others. 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.

Writing and Translation

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."[1] 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."[2] 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."[3] With Australian poet-activist John Kinsella, Gander wrote the cross-genre book Redstart: an Ecological Poetics.

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."[4] It needs, she wrote, "to be read slowly, to be uncovered like a secret or discovered like a treasure."[5] As a Friend has been published in translation in Bulgarian, Spanish, French, and German editions. In November 2014, New Directions released Gander's second novel The Trace, about a couple who, researching the last journey of Civil War writer Ambrose Bierce, find themselves lost in the Chihuahua Desert. Regarding this novel, The New Yorker noted that "Gander’s poetic writing lends this adventure story a dense, brooding atmosphere; Dale and Hoa’s troubles unfold slowly in this carefully crafted novel of intimacy and isolation."[6] And in The Paris Review, Robyn Creswell commented that "Gander’s landscapes are lyrical and precise (“raw gashed mountains, gnarly buttes of andesite”), and his study of a marriage on the rocks is as empathetic as it is unsparing.”[7]

Gander is a translator with a particular interest in poetry from Spain, Latin America, and Japan. Besides editing several anthologies of poetry from Spain, Mexico, and Latin America, Gander has translated distinct volumes by Mexican poets Pura López Colomé, Coral Bracho (PEN Translation Finalist for Firefly Under the Tongue), and Alfonso D'Aquino, another poet connected with ecopoetry.[8] With Kyoko Yoshida, Gander translated Spectacle & Pigsty: Selected Poems of Kiwao Nomura (OmniDawn, 2011), winner of the 2012 Best Translated Book Award; he is currently editing a volume of selected poems of Yoshimasu Gozo. 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).

Selected publications

Poetry Collections

Chapbooks

Novels

Collaborative Works

Essay Collections

In Translation

Translations

Anthologies Edited

Awards and honors

References

  1. ↑ Huston, Karla (September 2005). "Book Review". Library Journal 130 (14): 146.
  2. ↑ Hass, Robert (May 2, 1999). "Book World". The Washington Post.
  3. ↑ "Pulitzer Prize". http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/Poetry''.
  4. ↑ Winterson, Jeanette (December 19, 2008). "A Death in Full". The New York Times Sunday Book Review.
  5. ↑ Winterson, Jeanette. "A Death in Full". The New York Times. Retrieved December 19, 2008.
  6. ↑ Denhoed, Andrea (November 4, 2014). "Books to Watch Out For: November". The New Yorker.
  7. ↑ Creswell, Robyn. "Staff Picks". The Paris Review.
  8. ↑ http://forrestgander.com/books%20translations/index.html

External links