Core Samples from the World

 

/ FINALIST FOR 2012 PULITZER PRIZE
/ Pulitzer citation: "A compelling work that explores cross-cultural tensions in the world and digs deeply to identify what is essential in human experience."
/ With photographs by Lucas Foglia, Graciela Iturbide, Raymond Meeks

Forrest Gander’s Core Samples for the World is a magnificent compendium of poetry, photography, and haibun (a Japanese form of essay-poem). Collaborating with three acclaimed photographers, Gander considers tensions between the familiar and foreign. His eloquent new work voices an ethical concern for others, exploring empathic relations in which the world itself is fundamental. Taking us around the globe to China, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Chile, Core Samples shows how Gander’s “sharp sense of place has made him the most earthly of our avant-garde, the best geographer of fleshly sites since Olson” (Donald Revell, The Colorado Review).

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Praise

“I don’t think I’ve read a more ambitious poetry book by an American this year.”
— Anis Shivani, Huffington Post
“Gander is exceptional in the subtlety of his perception and proposals, a great ‘reader’ of other cultures, and a very resourceful poet.”
— Robert Creeley
“In the midst of such questioning, the only reality is the poet’s unflinchingly curious mind.”
— David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review
“The wonder of this is the concentration . . . I am thinking that there are writers and there are writers and this guy takes the cake.”
— Literature, Philosophy, & the Humanities
“…crafted masterfully from beginning to end… the only equivalent to it in any art that I can think of might be Twyla Tharp’s choreography.”
— Ron Silliman
“A profound ethical impulse.”
— Dustin Simpson, Chicago Review
 
 
Nancy Campana