Lynchburg


 
Like the Sally Mann cover photo ‘The Ditch,’ these poems come from another opalescent and shadowed time. Frayed at the edges, his scenes elicit a sense of having peered into something for some time before realizing, suddenly, what exactly about it we do know; then his poems read as though our minds had been making sense of them in that exact way all along . . . . But what is most remarkable about Gander is his ability to isolate events as though they occur purely within the random constructions of language . . . . This collection is an adventure to embark on.
— Linda Russo, The Harvard Review

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Reviews

In the rural south of Forrest Gander’s haunting new book of poems, images of spiritual death and rebirth glitter and coil back on themselves like rattlesnakes . . . . Like the reverend who ‘with a stick and flashlight / scares snakes into shadows’ or the lovers who ‘connect points of light / in the inarticulate heaven,’ Gander’s voices beat back the darkness of the tribe and struggle to achieve a deeper communion before ‘winking out / into afterglow.’ Lynchburg represents a striking attempt to reclaim a parched landscape of the heart.
— Andrew Sofer, Poet Lore
That’s the pulse I hear throughout Lynchburg, subtle, definitely offbeat, but insistent and powerful . . . it’s the understated feelings of these poems that I especially value more than any picturesqueness or regional flavor, their surprise, the strange, sharp configuration of their lines.
— Richard Silberg, Poetry Flash
Like the Sally Mann cover photo ‘The Ditch,’ these poems come from another opalescent and shadowed time. Frayed at the edges, his scenes elicit a sense of having peered into something for some time before realizing, suddenly, what exactly about it we do know; then his poems read as though our minds had been making sense of them in that exact way all along . . . . But what is most remarkable about Gander is his ability to isolate events as though they occur purely within the random constructions of language . . . . This collection is an adventure to embark on.
— Linda Russo, The Harvard Review
 
 
Nancy Campana