Deeds of Utmost Kindness
"Whether in a portrait of someone being hit by cars while working
on the highway or a country boy driving his pickup, there is an inbred
(and often haunting) spirituality [to the poems in Deeds of Utmost
Kindness.]"
-Publishers Weekly
"Gander's poems fix flights of mind from lovemaking to landings
to stunning minutiae. Here, there: Kyoto, Kentucky, and Arkansas - 'a
Quapaw word. It means handsome man.' Gander can write masculine lines
focused on feminine inventions sensuous as 'mouthlight.' A sound master,
his music uses dissonance, too: "footsucking weedlots,' 'Chalkstrokes
of last crickets.' Eros presides over these generous poems that ring with
the wonderous names of lowly things."
-Village Voice Literary Supplement
"In his new collection, Deeds of Utmost Kindness, Forrest
Gander tests the limits of poetic acceleration well beyond the means of
genre . . . . For Gander, meaning is an exact, if momentary, place. It
is also an exacting one, surcharged with perils of sexuality, violence,
and all such fires. Certainly, his sharp sense of place has made him the
most earthy of our avant-garde, the best geographer of fleshly sites since
Olson."
-Donald Revell, The Colorado Review