Forrest Gander will speak about and sign his new book, Be With, on Thursday, October 18th. For specific reading times, please see event website.

About the book:

Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section—a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s—rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, “the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane.”

About the festival:

For the fifth time, the largest poetry event in North America comes to New Jersey’s largest city when the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival return to Newark from Thursday October 18th through Sunday October 21, 2018. For four days Newark’s vibrant downtown Arts District will host the Festival, featuring some of our most celebrated, diverse and vibrant poets and spoken word artists.