Core Samples from the World

Forrest Gander

In Core Samples Gander burrows into the particularities of disparate places and cultures in order to sound the differences between them. His work moves across forms and modes, reminding us that writing is an action, a process of creation, itself a form of traveling.

— The Boston Review

Core Samples from the World

Forrest Gander’s Core Samples from the World is a magnificent compendium of poetry, photography, and essay (a form of Japanese haibun). Collaborating with three acclaimed photographers, Gander explores tensions between the familiar and foreign. His eloquent new work voices an ethical concern for others, exploring empathic relations in which the world itself is fundamental. Taking us around the globe to China, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Chile, Core Samples shows how Gander’s “sharp sense of place has made him the most earthly of our avant-garde, the best geographer of fleshly sites since Olson” (Donald Revell, The Colorado Review). 20 black-and-white photographs

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Edition Data

Paperback(published Jun, 08 2011)

ISBN

9780811218870

Price US

15.95

Forrest Gander

American poet, novelist, and translator

In Core Samples Gander burrows into the particularities of disparate places and cultures in order to sound the differences between them. His work moves across forms and modes, reminding us that writing is an action, a process of creation, itself a form of traveling.

— The Boston Review

The reader is constantly surprised by what comes next — such as a side trip to Utopia, VA — and begins to crave the interruptions, which add freshness and energy to the work.

— Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post

He brings the world’s frightening and beautiful strangeness far beyond the edge of the page.

— Critical Mass

The wonder of this is the concentration…. I am thinking that there are writers and there are writers and this guy takes the cake.

— * Literature, Philosophy, & the Humanities Journal*

As a poet, reader, and translator, Gander dreams of the incipient vision opening to us from the other side of the consciousness, the muscular curtain drawn back from the beginning of dream.

— Chicago Review