Be With

WINNER OF THE 2019 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRYLONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDPublishers WeeklyBest Poetry Book of 2018Forrest Ganders 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 intimacyDrawing 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 U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third sectiona moving transcription of Ganders efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimersrise from the page 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.