|
|
| photo: Ashwini Bhat | |
Forrest Gander, born in the Mojave Desert, lives in California. He is a translator/poet with degrees in geology and literature, and has been a signal voice for environmental poetics. His book of poetry Be With won the Pulitzer Prize, and his book Core Samples from the World was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Mojave Ghost: a Novel-Poem (New Directions, October 1, 2024) is his long poem on the desert.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Following the deaths of my wife and mother, I began to walk the 800-mile San Andreas Fault toward the desert town of my birth.
On your nightstand now:
Don Mee Choi's intensely riveting, genre-defying Mirror Nation. Katie Peterson's mysterious, soul-thurifying Fog and Smoke. Paul Yamazaki's avuncular recorded talks on his role at City Lights Bookstore, Reading the Room. And Farnoosh Fathi's delightfully methamphetaminate Granny Cloud.
Favorite book when you were a child:
There was never just one. I loved and read to my sister A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. And I still have both my illustrated 1959 edition of the international Stories That Never Grow Old by Watty Piper and Legends of Charlemagne by Thomas Bulfinch and illustrated (inciting my first erotic fixation) by N.C. Wyeth.
Your top five authors:
The truth is that many of my favorite authors are alive now, and it would be agonizing to try to winnow out five. So I'm going to list only the dead. Even that would be a rotating list. Here's who comes to mind most immediately today--five writers whose entire bodies of work I know well and my favorites of their books.
George Oppen, Of Being Numerous
Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
C.D. Wright, One With Others
Kamau Brathwaite, Trench Town Rock
Inger Christensen, Alphabet
Book you've faked reading:
Ulysses by James Joyce. I can quote the opening sentence, and I've several times started the book. But I never read the whole thing.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Poetics of a Wall Projection by Jan Turnovsky. A virtually unread, hard to find, absolutely fascinating, philosophical, and playful take on an architectural motif in a house that Wittgenstein designed. My son, Brecht, turned me onto this one.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Musical Brain by César Aira. Rodrigo Corral is my favorite book cover artist. His designs usually make subtle, but intuitively profound links to the books. This one is unusually showy but dazzling. Impossible not to notice.
Book you hid from your parents:
Well, it was "parent" singular. And my mom loved literature. I never had to hide a book under my bed.
Book that changed your life:
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. I told myself I'd be willing to cut off an arm to write just the first 10 pages. I still would.
Favorite line from a book:
A favorite last line, from James Joyce's The Dead: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
And a favorite opening line (which I love most in Spanish) from Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo: "Vine a Comala porque me dijeron que acá vivía mi padre, un tal Pedro Páramo."
Five books you'll never part with:
A first edition of Cathay by Ezra Pound signed to his college professor
The first edition of George Oppen's Primitive
Crib Death by Frank Stanford
First edition of La Noche by Jaime Sáenz
C.D. Wright's Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues (written at the start of our relationship--and then all the rest of her books)
Books you most want to read again for the first time:
Raúl Zurita's Purgatory
Lorine Niedecker's My Life by Water
Ben Ratliff's Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
Kim Hyesoon's Autobiography of Death
Frank Stanford's The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You