Torn Awake
“It isn’t long before the ethereal quality of these poems
begins to remind you of similar effects in the work of T. S. Eliot and
the 17th century Anglo-Welsh mystic Henry Vaughan . . . . The voices vary
throughout this book’s six highly speculative sequences . . . yet
again and again they call from their spectral airiness a single recurring
image, an elemental configuration of man, woman and child. Indeed the
book ends with a consideration of just such a threesome frozen forever
in the aftermath of an earthquake on ancient Cyprus, with the speaker
proposing that such a piteous sight can be taken as either a story with
no meaning or a meaning beyond story. In the midst of such questioning,
the only reality is the poet’s unflinchingly curious mind.”
-David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review, Jan. 13, 2002
“Forrest Gander is insistently, often gorgeously, a poet of space—the
spaces of landscape and geology, the spaces of erotic and patrilineal
bodies, and the spaces among and inside the words on the page of a poem
. . . . If Gander’s philosophical strain and flamboyant lingo suggest
Wallace Stevens, and his conversance with science and his stress on the
“ongoing” recall A. R. Ammons, he insinuates a knotty, digressive
intensity that is fully his own.”
-Robert Polito, Book Forum, Fall 2001
“Gander is a poet of tremendous richness: his lines are not only
sharp, they radiate another essential ingredient of poetry: play. They
have that wonderful energy of dance . . . . Gander excels at line breaks:
the intense particularity of his images break at just the precise point
where they register as images. He adds more tension by sequencing the
lines in step-down patterns, giving added drama to their elaboration in
the manner of a stage director orchestrating a mise en scene.”
-John Olson, First Intensity, #17, 2002
“Fatherhood and family life lie at the center of this book, and
this subject matter helps to preserve the appeal of Gander’s torquing
language. Torn Awake memorializes the ‘voluptuous/ Acoustics
of home” . . . . [The overall] structure gives the volume a rhythm
of expansion and contraction, and it balances the disjunctions of the
longer sequences with the poignancy of lyric apostrophe . . . . Read him
because he marshals a sinewy and strenuous language for familial, sensory,
and erotic experience.”
-Barbara Fischer, Boston Review, Summer 2002
“Love of the physical world and an attendant desire to crack open
its untranslatable nature has long been at the core of Forrest Gander’s
poetic investigations. Torn Awake . . . continues this devotion
with an Orphean passion that verges on heartbreak. What genuine love requires
of us is, as Gander illuminates, nothing short of “an exile between
self and self” and Torn Awake records a perpetual struggle
to brave this cast-out condition: to sustain an existence without the
protection of “the tactual amnion of habit” . . . . Torn
Awake speaks to its readers with the intimacy of the lover speaking
to the beloved.”
-Kim Fortier, Rain Taxi, Spring 2002