Dobby Gibson

The poems in Dobby Gibson’s new book transform the everyday into the revelatory Little Glass Planet exults in the strangeness of the known and unknowable world. In poems set as far afield as Mumbai and Marfa, Texas, Dobby Gibson maps disparate landscapes, both terrestrial and subliminal, to reveal the drama of the quotidian. Aphoristic, allusive, and collaged, these poems mine our various human languages to help us understand what we might mean when we speak to each other—as lovers, as family, as strangers. Little Glass Planet uses lyric broadcasts to foreshorten the perceived distances between us, opening borders and pointing toward a sense of collectivity. “This is my love letter to the world,” Gibson writes, “someone call us a sitter. / We’re going to be here a while.” Elegiac, funny, and candid, Little Glass Planet is a kind of manual for paying attention to a world that is increasingly engineered to distract us from our own humanity. It’s a book that points toward hope, offering the possibilities of a “we” that only the open frequency of poetry can create, possibilities that are indistinguishable from love.

Poems

Little Glass Planet

"Dobby Gibson's poetry . . . is equal parts tender, triumphant, exhilarating, disturbing, and thought provoking: it's fantastic." (The Corresponder) * Shortlisted for the Believer Poetry Award * From the backs of the books I love and am terrified by, the great thinkers stare back at me with little encouragement. I am prepared to follow them anywhere! --from "Ago" Meditative, lyrical, aphoristic, and always leavened with a wry wit, the poems in Dobby Gibson's It Becomes You explore the divergent conditions by which we're perpetually defined--the daily weather, the fluctuations of the Dow, the growth of a cancer cell, the politics of the day. What surrounds us becomes us, Gibson suggests, in a book that will ultimately become you.

It Becomes You

A poet descended from the New York School, Dobby Gibson’s award-winning debut is witty and expansive, driven by precise, interconnected abstractions. Gibson writes about desire in American life, observing, “Amid the middleness, / there’s the feeling / that anything can be seen / and nothing reached,” seeking his truths in misunderstandings and the relentless Midwestern winter.

Polar

“These poems are written by a true poet, someone in love with the world and mad at it too, and they are also written by a very particular poet, Dobby Gibson, who is madly in love with the other mysterious inner world each of us possesses and reveals when no one else is looking. ‘It may be true that everything / has already been said, / but it’s just as true that not everyone / has had a chance to say it.’ How can one not listen to the innards of a young poet who announces as much and then sets out, in his first book, to make it new? One can’t not listen. One must.”—Mary Ruefle A poetry descended from the New York School, Dobby Gibson’s award-winning debut is witty and expansive, driven by precise, interconnected abstractions. Gibson writes about desire in American life, observing, “Amid the middleness, / there’s the feeling / that anything can be seen / and nothing reached,” seeking his truths in misunderstandings and the relentless Midwestern winter. From No Wake The snowflakes taxi. The full moon coolly punctuates its own fantastic, howls the ohs of its own vowels. The firemen stop for directions. The children light cigarettes and wish they had invented their own feelings. The explorers who discovered only oceans we cannot name. In the distant universe there are things older than the light that illuminates the firmament, a place where every thought is a kind of unmarked car, where women wait inside the revolving door with a spritz of perfume and a secret for some newer side of ourselves we will recognize only in what little it will admit. Dobby Gibson holds an MFA in fiction from Indiana University. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Fence, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a $25,000 McKnight Foundation poetry fellow-ship and two Pushcart nominations.

Dobby Gibson

About

Books

Join the club