Your Nearness

“Forrest Gander knows that the poet’s first duty is “to see what’s there and not already patterned by familiarity” – and in Your Nearness he brings to that task a combination of vision, generosity of spirit and humility in the face of wonder that singles him out as one of the finest, and most vigilant, poets working in English today.”

John Burnside

Your Nearness is the American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander’s most recent collection, and his first to be published in the UK. Throughout the book, in poems of emotional intensity, delicacy and tenderness, Gander addresses the relationship of the personal and the environmental; the opening poems link human intimacy with the transformative collaborations between species that compose lichens, while some later poems focus on the emotional and ecological trauma resulting from the devastating wildfires in California where the poet lives. This is a collection that illuminates the tangled interrlations that bind us to others and the natural world, celebratory in tone and charged with exultation.

Forrest Gander is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and the recipient of fellowships from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Whiting Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. In 2017, he was elected as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets and in 2019, he was awarded The Pulitzer Prize in poetry. He taught at Providence College and at Harvard University before becoming the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literatures at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.