Mojave Ghost
/ A novel-poem
/ available october 1, 2024
/ publisher: New directions
A novel-poem taking us to the Pulitzer-prize winning poet's 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 confiding tones and candid self-examination, Mojave Ghost is Gander’s most inviting and poignant book yet.
"A compelling concoction of ecopoetic wonder, filled to the brim with insights into the inner workings of a speaker forever in longing after having longed, and loving after having loved—and having been loved."— Andrew Jones, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Reviews
Publishers Weekly starred review
Nature by Jon Christensen
4 Columns by Albert Mobilio
Los Angeles Review of Books by Christian Wessels
ALTA by David Ulin
Washington Post Book Club by Ron Charles
North American Review by Eric Bies
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by Andrew Jones
Review 31 (UK) Books of the Year 2024 by John Hay
Berkshire Magazine by Scott Edward Anderson
Harvard Review by William Doreski
New York Journal of Books by Karl Wolff
Adroit Journal by William Doreski
Only Poetry by Turi Sioson
Feature at Lit Hub
Paris Review Best Books of 2024
DIRT Magazine conversation with Yvonne Conza
LARB Radio Hour podcast with Kate Wolf and Eric Newman
Ode & Psyche podcast with Bianca Stone
Best Book Gifts 2024 at BOMB Magazine
In the Company of Rattlesnakes at BOMB Magazine
Desert Ghosts at ORION
Buy
Praise
“Powerful, mind-blowing, devastatingly profound, Forrest Gander is among the most extraordinary poets of North American poetry and of the poetry of our time.”