Mojave Ghost

"Powerful, mind-blowing, devastatingly profound, Forrest Gander is among the most extraordinary poets of North American poetry and of the poetry of our time." -- Raúl Zurita
"Gander’s verses have a shattering, symphonic quality." -- Tess Taylor - The New York Times
"Restlessly experimental, precise and hallucinatory." -- Washington Post
"These meditations on time themselves unfold in time. Gander shifts perspective from one poem to another. Sometimes, he speaks in the first person and sometimes in the third, as if the self he is writing about belonged to someone else.…The varied verse forms and shifting points of view in these poems imply that our ways of being with each other are mobile and situational, bound by time, and yet are also transcending it." -- Langdon Hammer
"Expansive and arresting… a book-length single poem that spans time, space, and narrative perspective against stark and arresting desert environments... Readers will be wowed." -- Publishers Weekly
""Mojave Ghost builds an ecosystem of people and memories, places in time, expressions of love, as the various figures and objects can only live in the context of each other . . . [A]s Mojave Ghost crosses and recrosses its self-made borders, a new kind of experience is being made and measured."" -- Christian Wessels - Los Angeles Review of Books
""Haunting and spiritual, Gander’s newest collection compels us to look at our connections to land and memory with tender, open eyes."" -- Turi Sioson - Only Poems
""An excavation of interior geography, of the faults and rift zones of its author’s psyche, his history and memory . . . In this magnificent and nuanced work, [Gander] wrestles with the most complicated and contradictory of human experiences: the implacable inevitability of our evanescence, the fallacy of memory, and the failure of time to redeem us, to offer consolation of any kind."" -- David L. Ulin - Alta Journal
"[Gander's] sense of the line is as strong as any poet’s since Ezra Pound and his ability to mingle abstract and concrete notions to link the world of the mind with the world of deserts and Gila monsters would please Wallace Stevens." -- William Doreski - The Adroit Journal
""A compelling concoction of ecopoetic wonder, filled to the brim with insights into the inner workings of a speaker forever in longing after having longed, and loving after having loved—and having been loved."" -- Andrew Jones - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost is a book to read and reread. You’ll want to return to it for the ways it loosens narrative, for its many voices / perspectives, for its open form, and for the immersion in the warm affection between the speaker and his wife—as well as for the gorgeous and crystal-clear images which are a hallmark of this poet’s work." -- Laura Mullen - California Review of Books
"Erotic devotion, grief and rapt observation alternate and triangulate and recur, just as "the lake’s small waves/go on wringing themselves out in the sand." An accretive, startlingly experienced, wise and finally hopeful book" -- Stephanie Burt - The London Review of Books
"Gander manages a delicate balancing act, bridging a gap between the wideness of the natural world and the smaller, personal space of memoiristic verse . . . A long, continuous poem in blank verse and with no set stanza structure, Mojave Ghost moves at a meditative crawl. Its quivering rhythms mimic those of a slow desert wind, picking up dust, chaff, and the bones of small mammals—a sort of primordial accumulation . . . The poetry wants to tear away the veil that habit has drawn over the natural world. And yet, having done this, it urges us to pull back and abide, to resist the urge to apply a fresh coat of meaning to what we’ve experienced . . . If there is a central lesson in Gander’s poetry, it might be precisely this: that consciousness, identity, and being itself are collaborations." -- Bailey Trela - The Nation