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Forrest Gander: Twice Alive
May 13, 2021 @ 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm PDT
Free
Co-presented by City Lights Books & Booksellers
Litquake is thrilled to present this launch event for the new poetry collection Twice Alive (New Directions), by Pulitzer Prize winner Forrest Gander. With these searing ecological love poems, Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and the tradition of Sangam literature, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illuminates our deep-tangled interrelations. Forrest will read from and discuss his work. Audience Q&A to follow.
FREE, $10-15 suggested donation
Registration required. Spots are limited.
Event will also be livecasted on Facebook Live.
While conducting fieldwork with a celebrated mycologist, Gander links human intimacy with the transformative collaborations between species that compose lichens.
Throughout Twice Alive, Gander addresses personal and ecological trauma—several poems focus on the devastation wrought by wildfires in California where he lives—but his tone is overwhelmingly celebratory. Twice Alive is a book charged with exultation and tenderness.
Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and grew up, for the most part, in Virginia. Trenchant periods of his life were spent in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo (Mexico), and Eureka Springs, Arkansas. With degrees in both geology and English literature, Gander is the author of numerous books of poetry, translation, fiction, and essays. He’s the A.K. Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University. A U.S. Artists Rockefeller fellow, Gander has been recipient of grants from the NEA, the Guggenheim, Howard, Witter Bynner and Whiting foundations. His 2011 collection Core Samples from the World was an NBCC and Pulitzer Prize finalist for poetry, and his 2018 collection Be With won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and was longlisted for the National Book Award.