Mojave Ghost

by Forrest Gander

Mojave Ghost, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Forrest Gander, is a “a novel poem,” taking us to his birthplace in the Mojave Desert and his current northern California home, where tumultuous memories coalesce with the present.


Mojave Ghost initiates an unusually tender bond with the reader as it chronicles an intimate relationship with arresting honesty and vividness. Moving through grief and loss towards a renewal that never sidesteps the wholeness of experience, Gander's new collection discovers an articulate language for the merging of exterior and interior landscapes. Gander, trained as a geologist, walked along much of the 800-mile San Andreas fault toward the desolate town of his birth, and found himself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating his emotions and the stricken landscape with other the fractures and folds underlying not only our country, but any self in its relationship with others. The result is this moving new collection that unforgettably describes a spiritual and physical journey. With its confidential tones and candid self-examination, Mojave Ghost is Gander’s most inviting and poignant book yet.

Genres: Poetry, Nature, Nonfiction, Environment

72 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 1, 2024

About the author

Born in the Mojave Desert, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia and spent significant periods in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo (Mexico), and Eureka Springs, Arkansas before moving to Rhode Island. He holds degrees in literature and in geology, a subject that recurs in his writing and for which his work has been connected to ecological poetics.

Collaboration has been an important engagement for Gander who, over the years, has worked with artists such as Ann Hamilton, Sally Mann, Eiko & Koma, Lucas Foglia, Ashwini Bhat, Richard Hirsch & Michael Rogers. He also translates extensively and has edited several anthologies of contemporary poetry from Latin America, Spain, and Japan.

He writes across the genres. A recent project with the Chilean poet Raul Zurita is Pinholes in the Night Essential Poems from Latin America. Other titles by Gander include The Trace, a novel set on the border with Mexico; Fungus Skull Eye Wing Selected Poems of Alfonso D'Aquino, translations; and Redstart an Ecological Poetics, essays and poems written with John Kinsella. Gander's 2011 book of poems, Core Samples from the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Reviews

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a haunting beauty to this volume. When I tried to think about how to describe the effect, all I could think of was opera. Gander delivers the emotional impact of a grief-filled aria, seguing back and forth around the theme, and balanced by his love, both for the one he has lost, and for the wild landscape that is a kind of home.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

how is it i can continue to smolder like this? why am i not consumed?

the new collection from poet, author, and translator forrest gander (born himself in the mojave desert), mojave ghost is reflective, tender, and stark. with keen observation of landscapes both exterior and interior, gander’s poems blaze trails into realms of desire, memory, longing, sorrow, time, aging, love, loss, nature, contemplation, and mortality. profundity enfolds, beauty abounds, and ache reverberates throughout mojave ghost. the desert looms above/below/around/within each of gander’s new poems, lending them a haunting quality — as if he'd unearthed an oasis of hard-won wisdom amidst all the aridity and grit and erosion.

i admit: all my gestures are addressed to you. you,
the starting point, the rhapsodic precedent.

even now, these years later, i’m still
turning my head, listening for your words.
i know i imagine them into being, there
being nothing else i can imagine.

in photographs taken of me before we met
i see only the impending joy in my face.

audible sunlight, the western meadowlark’s opera.
and each dawn, your sing-song greeting to the cat.

as if our happiness had its own desire,
the desire to trill, to cling to us, to stay.

[Paul]

I think I liked it because I am supposed to like it. I don’t know how to rate something like this because I have no basis. So.

[Anna Mick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Narrative, you say, is just one way of navigating time."

Beautiful, deeply romantic, raw. Gander has a way with words I think only environmental scientists have, really, where every description is so precise and specific but not in a way that feels clinical. You can feel his simultaneous grief and admiration for the people he has loved and lost in the pages, as well as the desert he's called home.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmmlQ...

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among other rewards, Forrest Gander is a great love poet as he is in this novel poem, in love not only with a woman but all he sees and understands and others, like I think one of his models,W.C. Williams especially Desert Music, and in the latin quote here veritas sequitur esse serum.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reviewed this, here: https://northamericanreview.org/open-...

[Joe Imwalle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Packed with precise language, juxtaposition of vivid imagery and emotion, and stand out lines worthy of memorization. The poems are open ended and can reveal more with each reading.

[casey vieira · Rating 5 out of 5]

memory rising up from the desert in animals, whispers, faults

where things sound and do not, where things move and do not

[Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astonishing command of prose.

"Will you let me approach you? Bend forward and touch consequence, tenderness, leave the trace of my fingertips on your throat's dimple, your clavicle, nipple? Lean in. In my mouth, the sound of your name has changed."

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. There were some strong poems in here, but interspersed with ones that I felt left something to be desired.

[Paige Goulden · Rating 5 out of 5]

So so SO good - beautiful and of the earth

[Mary]

it’s hard for me to rate poetry, but i really appreciated how the poems’ descriptions of nature, love, and grief intertwined

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

high contender for book of the year

[Sakura · Rating 4 out of 5]

real salt of the earth stuff… good read goodreads

[Libby · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel compelled to write a review about this book because, in the past few months, I’ve had an unspoken agreement with myself that I will only read poetry written by women (shocking, I know. Men have traditionally been given way too much credit and leniency in the way of poetry).

However, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of yearning and emotional awareness expressed in this book. Men don’t yearn nearly enough anymore.

I found Forrest Gander’s relaying of personal intimacies particularly moving and poignant. He seems to capture the ‘ineffability’ (as he puts it) of love well. I like his phrasing of ‘my experience of you is infinite. Never // contained within your dimensions’. Isn’t that how we all seek to be loved?

Although some of the verse is rather verbose and meandering, I don’t feel as though I got lost entirely. The narrative, in a kind of vignette form, sweeps you along and is vivid.

Finally, the part which has resonated with me most, and I think sets up the text entirely, is the following:

‘Each // thinks the other is a bit emptier, more // cardboard than himself, that he alone // made the necessary decisions’.

As someone interested in the concept of solipsism, Gander seems to concede to the ‘navel gazing’ accusations often directed at the poetic form, yet this makes his writing more compelling. We begin and end with this essential truth.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and I would be interested to check out more of his work.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brief poem novel about love and the desert. Gonna be real honest "Read some poetry" came up on my reading challenge, so I did what anyone does. I went to my library walked to new nonfiction, sought 811ish in the dewey decimal and grabbed the first thing that caught my eye.

Broadly, I enjoyed this. Calling it a novel is misleading, it lacks that sort of narrative structure. Generally the poems were good (I guess, what do I know?), but I found Ganders tendency to use unusual words distracting. I'm not adverse looking up a word, but when you use rivel instead of shrivel or a word like stirp (both of which might just be an editing failure), I wind up pausing everything to figure it out. I dislike that. Contrariwise, I enjoyed the tendency to describe colors as minerals. The "ilmenite night" for example. That helped keep focus on the desert and landscape. There were some lines and phrases that will stick with me, which I appreciate.

And that's Mojave Ghost for me.

[Arquitecto Defecto · Rating 2 out of 5]

I became suspicious the moment I read "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" on the cover, as if making it obvious that the book itself has little merit, that it should be read only because of who wrote it.

A cement mixer? While I am sure those do exist, they wouldn't be roaming the streets; those would only appear in a cement factory prior to filling sacks with cement. Cement is a powder. What the editor should have caught here is the use of "concrete mixer," as concrete and cement are not the same thing - one is a component of the other.

"Cuánto cuesta ir al centro, señor?" Without proper Spanish punctuation(¿)?

Ones and zeros? Is there an app for that? These could have been stated more esoterically.

The visitations in these poems go beyond the Mojave, yet the Mojave is the only desert mentioned, but it is not explained why.

[Andy Oram · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the subtitle of this book calls it a novel, I think of the collection more like a hologram, where each piece reveals the overall image in a blurry form. After all, Gander's wife says that narrative "is just one way of navigating time."

The book sprang from Gander's mourning of his recently deceased wife and mother, and proceeds through reveries. He is disconnected from reality, admitting that "my life is always elsewhere." Odd juxtapositions of fantastic images alternate with actual scenes from his past. "Time metamorphoses memories and buries them."

I recommend this book to all who can "learn to use time unprofitably."

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend recommended this after I raved about roadside geology creeping into my poems. Mojave Ghost is a beautiful, grief-stricken meandering through the desert as Gander reflects on the loss of his partner. I have been drawn lately to reflective work of older poets (like Louise Glück's collection that came out just before she passed).

"What is so ordinary about living every day,
as we do, at the threshold of each other?" (37)

Sure, the collection is heartbreaking, but it's also funny & sexy at times - I too, will be telling my partner about their "garlic-clove" butt.

[Gregory Pedersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t have enough experience with poetry to provide a real insightful review. From the linguistic side, I enjoyed the ebb and flow of descriptive words and similes/metaphors used by the author. The content and tone was morose if not mildly depressing, but it was intended to be an homage to his departed wife so that’s understandable. The ties made to nature and the authors colorful descriptors of nature were very enjoyable.

[Tere · Rating 5 out of 5]

Experimental is a term that can turn off lovers of classical poems and short stories, but the term sometimes applies to the most exciting writers of the day. Forrest Gander is an exciting writer who packs into a very thin book of poems a vast love of American landscapes and the people who inhabit them. He is a master of detail. Exquisite.

[Julia Bucci · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The oldest extant pigment of color, scraped
from rocks beneath the desert,
is a flaming pink.

Spring comes. It breaks into me. You
break into me.

While the past goes on lifting out of itself like a wave.

But you had the sense to linger by the shore
as I snorkeled out over the nebulous,
slo-mo, shark-eerie drop off
of the shelf."

[Timothy Haggerty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent

Different and enjoyable view from other eyes. Having grown up in SoCal I have a memory of these places. Traveling across seeing the places from another. I feel like I was taken back to the land.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Billed as a "novel poem" I thought I was getting a deep meditation on the desert, but it's actually a series of love poems. If you want to write about finding love in your sixties, go right ahead but call it what it is.

[Serhiy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection features captivating poems about loss, grief, love, landscape, and hope. I especially enjoyed the nature references and imagery, which the poet uses to connect us to the world. The poems about motherly, nostalgic, and new love are masterfully put together.

[cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 and rounding up

[Cynthia Sprout]

DNF lovely but still poetry

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 3/4 stars

[Emma Shanti · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you need me, I will be trekking through Forrest Gander's landscape in Mojave Ghost, blinded by the radiance of his poetry