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.
Forrest Gander, born in the Mojave Desert, lives in California. A translator and writer with degrees in geology and literature, he’s the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Be With (2018), the Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and United States Artists.
Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, and The Word Pretty. She writes a regular poetry column for The New York Times, and her work has appeared recently in Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, A Public Space, American Poetry Review, New England Review, The Yale Review, and The Nation. Her next book of poems, Normal Distance, will be out from Soft Skull in 2022.