Mojave Ghost
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Mojave Ghost, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Forrest Gander, is a “a novel poem,” taking us to his birthplace in the Mojave Desert and his current northern California home, where tumultuous memories coalesce with the present.
Mojave Ghost initiates an unusually tender bond with the reader as it chronicles an intimate relationship with arresting honesty and vividness. Moving through grief and loss towards a renewal that never sidesteps the wholeness of experience, Gander's new collection discovers an articulate language for the merging of exterior and interior landscapes. Gander, trained as a geologist, walked along much of the 800-mile San Andreas fault toward the desolate town of his birth, and found himself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating his emotions and the stricken landscape with other divisions: the fractures and folds underlying not only our country, but any self in its relationship with others. The result is this moving new collection that unforgettably describes a spiritual and physical journey. With its confidential tones and candid self-examination, Mojave Ghost is Gander’s most inviting and poignant book yet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The expansive and arresting latest from Pulitzer winner Gander (Be With) comprises what he calls a "novel poem," a book-length single poem that spans time, space, and narrative perspective against stark and arresting desert environments. Roughly broken into page-long scenes, the poem asks, "Is there an emotion of awareness?" Working to transcend the constraints of narrative, the poet decenters himself within the landscapes he explores. "The goal was never knowledge, but attentiveness," he writes, "those constant bearers of meaning/ bore me." Gander shifts perspective between first and second person, addressing his beloved companion as both "you" and "she," and reflects on the multifaceted nature of experience: "As my memories and the present mixed, as my tumultuous inner emotions and the landscape coalesced, I felt my sense of self become kaleidoscopic." A geologist by training, Gander sketches the natural world in ways that are strange and, at times, startlingly precise. In one poem, he describes "walking along/ into the faintly semen-smell of the middle of the night." The eye of a just-slaughtered cow is "nicotine Saturn," and "the spring hills boing green." Readers will be wowed.
