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About Be With (Unabridged)

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 US 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 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".