Core Samples from the World

by Forrest Gander, Raymond Meeks (Photographer), Graciela Iturbide (Photographer), Lucas Foglia (Photographer)

Overview

A gorgeous, wide-ranging volume of poetry and essays by Forrest Gander, studded with the work of three great photographers.

Forrest Gander’s Core Samples from the World is a magnificent compendium of poetry, photography, and essay (a form of Japanese haibun). Collaborating with three acclaimed photographers, Gander explores 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).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811218870
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/08/2011
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and grew up in Virginia. In addition to writing poetry, he has translated works by Coral Bracho, Alfonso D’Aquino, Pura Lopez-Colome, Pablo Neruda, and Jaime Saenz. The recipient of grants from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting, and United States Artists Foundations, he taught for many years as the AK Seaver Professor of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Editorial Reviews

Gander is an experimental poet in the most literal sense of the word, in that each of his books attempts things that haven't been tried before, either by him or others. In this eighth collection, four sequences of poems respond to pictures by three photographers—Raymond Meeks, Graciela Iturbide, and Lucas Foglia—making of the images metaphors for people and places that are easy to see but difficult to penetrate. The poems don't describe the pictures so much as work in chorus with them; in a poem on whose facing page is a Meeks photo of a shirtless, dust-covered boy carrying a basket, Gander writes: "I cannot be discarded, his eyes say," which is as much a response to the picture as it is a challenge to the visitor to take the unfamiliar place on its own terms. Concluding each section is a piece of jumpy prose, a kind of lyric essay, narrating one of four journeys—to Xinjiang, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina. and Chile—all of which serve to illustrate that "Behind everything/ the foreigner sees, something he doesn't/ know how to look for." In these pieces, Gander gets as close as one can to the sensations of being an outsider straining toward empathy: "I wanted to borrow eyes/ from another language," he writes. "I was looking for the words to come." (May)

Publishers Weekly

In Core Samples Gander burrows into the particularities of disparate places and cultures in order to sound the differences between them. His work moves across forms and modes, reminding us that writing is an action, a process of creation, itself a form of traveling.

Boston Review

Each section opens with a complex, disorienting poem that re-creates the traveler’s experience of being in a place where things don’t quite make sense. Then Gander shares stories of things he has seen or heard of. He records his observations as he travels with other writers and exchanges ideas about poetry’s ability to transcend borders. The reader is constantly surprised by what comes next — such as a side trip to Utopia, Va. — and begins to crave the interruptions, which add freshness and energy to the work

The Washington Post

Gander has always been an innovative poet, and one deeply concerned with the events, and languages, beyond America’s borders.  In this, certainly his most accessible, and possibly his most powerful, book, he brings the world’s frightening and beautiful strangeness far beyond the edge of the page.

Craig Morgan Teicher - Critical Mass

Gander pays attention to nuance. He sees collaborations between the world and self as ethical questions.

Grace Cavalieri - Washington Independent Book Review

Wry and glimmering. Gander's border crossings and core samples illuminate places that grant revelations bemusing and profound.

Donna Seaman - Booklist

Gander has always been an innovative poet, and one deeply concerned with the events, and languages, beyond America’s borders. In this, certainly his most accessible, and possibly his most powerful, book, he brings the world’s frightening and beautiful strangeness far beyond the edge of the page.

”— Craig Morgan Teicher

Critical Mass

Gander pays attention to nuance. He sees collaborations between the world and self as ethical questions.”— Grace Cavalieri

Washington Independent Book Review

Wry and glimmering. Gander's border crossings and core samples illuminate places that grant revelations bemusing and profound.”— Donna Seaman

Booklist

A foreigner with poetry as his passport, Pushcart/Whiting award winner Gander (Eye Against Eye) takes "core samples" of the cultures he finds on journeys to China, Mexico, Chile, and Bosnia and Herzegovina and presents them in a blend of poetry, haibun (a Japanese form of essay-poem), and photography (by a trio of others). "Did you know Bosnia is the only country without a McDonald's?" a new friend in Sarajevo asks him; while in San Luis Potosí, another man points out Julieta, owner of "the most famous legs in Mexico," since they were caught on video when tossed into the air by a renegade bull. In Beijing, Gander marvels at what "appears to be a casino boat on the lake," ornate and beautiful, "carved from ocherous marble." But not all is easygoing: "At dinner, the Santiago poet averts her face from the gringo…. A synecdoche, he is taken for his government…. With suspicion at the threshold of dialogue, there is always a word blocking the first word." VERDICT This impressive compendium takes us to corners of the world well worth seeing, particularly through Gander's eyes. Recommended for all readers of contemporary poetry.—Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia

Library Journal

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