Forrest Gander

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 beencalled 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."

Be With

Twice Alive

Coral Bracho

It Must Be a Misunderstanding

A breakthrough book for award-winning poet Forrest Gander, whose richness of language and undaunted lyric passion place him in traditions ranging from Emily Dickinson to Michael Ondaatje. His poems in leading journals plumb the erotic depths of human interaction with the land. The poems in SCIENCE & STEEPLEFLOWER test this relationship with what PUBLISHERS WEEKLY has called "an inbred (and often haunting) spirituality", bringing us to new vistas of linguistic and perceptive grace.

Science & Steepleflower

A compendium of poetry, photography and haibun (Japanese essay-poem).

Core Samples from the World

A new collection by one of America's most respected young experimental poets.

Torn Awake

A first collection of essays by the award-winning poet explores what it means to be faithful in the act of translation, in scientific and spiritual inquiry, in friendship, and in other arenas, in a volume that pays homage to the American South, writers from various parts of the world, and snapping turtles.

Reading, Memory, and Transcendence

A Faithful Existence

Reeling from a tragedy involving their teenage son, a couple trying to reconnect drives through the Chihuahua Desert, following in the footsteps of Ambrose Bierce, an American writer who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution.

A Novel

The Trace

An exciting new book about renewal by the winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry In the searing poems of his new collection, Twice Alive, the Pulitzer Prize–winner Forrest Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and his immersion in Sangam literary traditions, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illuminates our deep-tangled interrelations. While conducting fieldwork with a celebrated mycologist, Gander links human intimacy with the transformative collaborations between species that compose lichens. Throughout Twice Alive, Gander addresses personal and ecological trauma—several poems focus on the devastation wrought by wildfires in California where he lives—but his tone is overwhelmingly celebratory. Twice Alive is a book charged with exultation and tenderness.

Mark Levine

Mark Levine is a Wallace Stevens for our generation. A book of poems involved with the processes of remembrance and questions of the personal and historical past.

The Wilds

Luis Cortés Bargalló

"Since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the United States and Mexico have been inextricably linked. The blending of the American and Mexican cultures has enriched both nations. Through a partnership to promote wider access to literary voices of Mexican artists in the U.S. and American writers in Mexico, the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Embassy in Mexico, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico have joined together to support a program of anthology publications and public outreach activities. The two-volume set-Lineas conectadas: nueva poesia de los Estados Unidos and Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico-is the first installment in the series. With definitive translations by leading writers and scholars, these dual volumes offer a glimpse into the beauty of the Mexican and the American experience through the microscopic lens of poetry. Whether read for personal pleasure or classroom study, Lineas conectadas and Connecting Lines are a must-read for anyone curious of our ever-increasing multicultural identity."--Publisher's website.

New Poetry from Mexico

Connecting Lines

Eliot Weinberger

Dunya Mikhail

Lydia Davis

Susan Howe

Osama Alomar

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Alejandra Pizarnik

Hilda Doolittle

Bernadette Mayer

Nathaniel Tarn

Oliverio Girondo

Sylvia Legris

Collections 1-12 in New Directions' Poetry Pamphlet series

Poetry Pamphlets 1-12

Among the most gifted and accomplished poets of his generation (Mark Rudman). 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 blister 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.

Eye Against Eye

An unforgettable, sensual novel by "one of the most gifted and accomplished poets of his generation" (Mark Rudman). "Heroism is a secondary virtue," Albert Camus noted, "but friendship is primary." In his gem-like 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, As a Friend tells the story of Les, a gifted man and land surveyor, whose impact on those around him (his friend Clay, his girlfriend Sarah) 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.

As a Friend: A Novel

John Kinsella

Poets Forrest Gander and John Kinsella offer an experiment, a collaborative volume of prose and poetry that investigates—both thematically and formally—the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception. They ask whether, in an age of globalization, industrialization, and rapid human population growth, an ethnocentric view of human beings as a species independent from others underpins our exploitation of natural resources. Does the disease of Western subjectivity constitute an element of the aesthetics that undermine poetic resistance to the killing of the land? Why does “the land” have to give something back to the writer?

An Ecological Poetics

Redstart

An unforgettable, sensual novel by one of the most gifted and accomplished poets of his generation (Mark Rudman).

As a Friend

Pablo Neruda

This stunning collection gathers never-before-seen poems, found by archivists in boxes kept at the Pablo Neruda Foundation in Chile in 2014. Neruda is renowned for poetry that casts away despair and celebrates living, fired by his belief that there is no unsurmountable solitude. Then Come Back presents Neruda's mature imagination and writing: signature love poems, odes, anecdotes, and poems of the political imagination. Translator Forrest Gander beautifully renders the eros and heartache, deep wonder and complex wordplay of the original Spanish, which is presented here alongside full-colour reproductions of the poems in their original composition on napkins, playbills, receipts, and in notebooks. Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda simultaneously completes and advances the oeuvre of the Nobel Laureate. Discovered during the cataloguing of Neruda's papers, there are 21 poems in all, together with detailed notes about how they relate to his published work.

Forrest Gander

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