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
"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