"Forrest Gander knows that the poet's first duty is "to see what's there
and not already patterned by familiarity" - and in Your Nearness he
brings to that task a combination of vision, generosity of spirit and
humility in the face of wonder that singles him out as one of the
finest, and most vigilant, poets working in English today."
John Burnside
Your Nearness is the American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest
Gander's most recent collection, and his first to be published in the
UK. Throughout the book, in poems of emotional intensity, delicacy and
tenderness, Gander addresses the relationship of the personal and the
environmental; the opening poems link human intimacy with the
transformative collaborations between species that compose lichens,
while some later poems focus on the emotional and ecological trauma
resulting from the devastating wildfires in California where the poet
lives. This is a collection that illuminates the tangled interrlations
that bind us to others and the natural world, celebratory in tone and
charged with exultation.
Forrest Gander is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and the
recipient of fellowships from the Library of Congress, the National
Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The
Whiting Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. In 2017, he was elected
as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets and in 2019, he was
awarded The Pulitzer Prize in poetry. He taught at Providence College
and at Harvard University before becoming the Adele Kellenberg Seaver
Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literatures at Brown
University in Providence, Rhode Island.
