Torn Awake

A new collection by one of America's most respected young experimental poets.

In his new collection Torn Awake, Gander continues to blend passion with intelligence, unveiling the forces of physical nature and personhood, the self as a construction of reciprocally reflective relations. Proposing models of hybridity, each of the book's major sequences develops a unique subject, rhythm, and form. Bringing to light the molten potential at the core of personality, the poems illuminate ways that language, as history read by anthropologists, discourse between lovers, gestures between parent and child, graffiti in temples, or even language as an event in itself (the very experience of words at play), incarnates presence. Addressing father and son relationships, and venerating erotic love, Gander's poems surge with vitality: the energy of active discovery.

Forrest Gander (b. 1956) was born in the Mojave Desert and grew up, for the most part, in Virginia. With degrees in geology and English literature, Gander is the author of numerous books of poetry, translation, fiction, and essays. Formerly A.K. Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander has been the recipient of grants from the NEA, the Guggenheim, Howard, Witter Bynner, and Whiting Foundations. His 2019 collection Be With won the Pulitzer prize for poetry and was longlisted for the National Book Award.