“In his first book of poems, Gander writes of the everyday (walking, kicking a can) and the exotic (Japanese sumo wrestlers) in a fresh and exacting style that seems to embody a way of thinking often uplifting, yet heavy with a darker vision as well. The poems pose interesting polarities- between East and West, sexuality and asceticism, the pushes and pulls of life and language.”
“Gander writes a cool, detached poetry, never confessional and autobiographical.... There’s a toughness, a hard edge of danger on the margins of these poems. Gander has a startling way of yoking beauty and violence.”
— Eliot Krieger, The Providence Sunday Journal
“Forrest Gander’s Rush to the Lake is cryptic and mysterious . . . . His poems often cross over into myth, tale or parable, or uncover a sense of archetype in a situation. Gander doesn’t stand under the umbrellas of any particular post-modern theories about poetry. His approach is to find what no one else possibly could know about his subject - and that approach guarantees an original voice.”
