"Forrest Gander is on good terms with the mineral world, and he's made a habit in his poetry of displaying a deep familiarity with the layers of sediment below our feet. His expertise-Gander is a geologist by training-has allowed him to convert technical terms (such as rift zone, ilmenite, and olivine) into lyrical tools that capture rarefied emotional states and complex systems of relation."
""The first dirt I tasted was a fistful of siltstone dust outside the house where I was born in the Mojave Desert," Gander writes in a brief preface. The dirt, the rocks, the minerals that make up the earth around him are an index of intimacy, of a time and place that shaped his fluid sensibility. Melding the human and nonhuman realms becomes an act of self-recognition for Gander, granting a deeper understanding of himself and the setting of his birth."
A poet with geological training converts technical mineral terms into lyrical tools that capture rarefied emotional states and complex systems of relation. An opening act of geophagy—tasting siltstone dust outside the house where the poet was born in the Mojave Desert—establishes intimate ties between body and earth. Dirt, rocks, and minerals serve as indexes of time, place, and sensibility. Grief for the poet’s mother, who died in 2020, functions as another form of intimacy and inscribes sorrow onto landscape. Home appears uncharmed, with encounters of Christian fundamentalism and retail sprawl, and images like an alabaster Elamite bull-god deepen the sense of embedded sorrow.
Read at The Nation
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