Knot

Praise for KNOT

"These pairings are brilliant and really show both the poet and photographer working as one—but also as individuals. . . . This sort of hybrid/cross-discipline project allows each artist to move in a different direction, to open themselves to new forms or styles. Gander questions what it means to be alone, to have lost someone, and how we can fight our inner selves. He doesn't really give us answers to these riddles of existence, but he's along with us for the journey, and that is sometimes more important."—Virginia Living

"Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Forrest Gander found himself entranced by a series of images captured by artist Jack Shear that depicted a nude male body engaged in an elaborate performance with a large bolt of fabric. Here, Gander uses his poetry to investigate Shear’s photographs so as to contemplate the nature of time, life, and loss."—Alta

Praise for Forrest Gander

“A collection of elegies that grapple with sudden loss, and the difficulties of expressing grief and yearning for the departed.”—Pulitzer judges’ statement  

“To write about profound loss, you step inside a genre, elegy, that is full of haunting echoes. … After Wright’s death, Gander’s memories revolve around objects, landscapes, work, and routines—symbols that become nearly sentient in their embodiment of his pain….The book as a whole [is] a self-suturing wound, equal parts bridge and void.”—The New Yorker

“In these poems, Gander’s visionary powers and inventive forms are on full display.”—San Francisco Chronicle, Best Books of 2018

“Life, death, and every minor phenomenon in between feels more vivid in Gander’s heartbreaking work.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“In poems that are utterly naked and bereft, elegies, apologies, could-have-beens, Gander grieves and wonders about what's left in his life.”—National Public Radio

“One of the things most alive in contemporary poetry is a sense that even as the ecological ship goes down, we might record the catastrophe, might leave a record of it, and of our witnessing ourselves witnessing what we’ve done to ourselves…. And Forrest Gander, as much as any poet alive, is the poet of our present, environmentally conscious grief.”—McSweeney’s