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Knot
The elements are timeless and fundamental—a male nude and a piece of black linen—and the photographic results are miraculous. Within Knot are twenty-three lush black and white photographs of a body and cloth performing a provocative ballet, a wrestling match, a tense sequence of appearances and disappearances that immediately take on symbolic weight. When poet Forrest Gander first encountered these images, he asked Jack Shear for more. As Gander recalls, the photographs arrived “dreamy, violent, mythic, and elemental… I set them up around the room and knew I wanted to write my way into them.” The result is a profound dialogue between word and image, observation and inspiration, imagination and intellect. “What do you see?” one poem wonders aloud. “A divinity wrung from a black cloud.”
- GenresPoetry
72 pages, Hardcover
Published November 1, 2022
9 people want to read
About the author
Forrest Gander
68 books181 followersBorn 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 23, 2022
[rating = B-]
Review via Virginia Living magazine
Both photography and poetry need the "viewer/reader" to function properly. Poet Forrest Gander, who grew up in Annandale, and photographer Jack Shear's first collaboration, Knot, works doubly hard to provide and elicit meaning from their audience. Not only is there a black and white photo (of a man in various stages of being covered by a black cloth) to observe, but there is a poem to read. The poems (all of them untitled) can be read alone but also in conjunction with the photo. A multiplicity of meanings is a very contemporary factor in literature. This isn't a John Donne or John Keats poem that has a straightforward message to deliver. The reader is a collaborator here.
Many of the poems seem to be more personal interpretations of the images. The first image (also the cover image) is a man holding up a black cloth. Gander makes this into a sort of Romeo climbing to Juliet's balcony—there is also an inescapable Rapuzel allusion to be had. "Haven't I been climbing for Hours," the narrator says. And indeed there seems to be a timelessness, a frozen-in-a-moment quality to the photo. The motion captured in Shear's work gives an interesting incongruity to the static performance of photography. Each is a sort of pause in a long dance where the poet (and the viewer) contemplate.
The collection of poems as a whole does not tell a single story, rather these poems are aligned by common themes. Ideas of "truth" and "self" and "stillness" and "shadows." Gander's topography also changes: some are prose poems, some are dialogues between two characters, and others are lines with white space separating phrases (instead of using enjambment). Not every poem hits the right chord. Several are much too literal, "When he came out, he was dressed I guess as a bat, waving" (p.36) or "A man. A naked man." (p.51); though others are clever: "Only the eyes / of my knees see / where I'm going" (p.35). When Gander makes the poem's speaker a literary character—like Achilles (p.40)—it often has a strong effect. Said poem questions the fleet-footed warrior (and lover) as lost "staring like that into his absence" (and the photo has a man staring into a spread-out cloth, as if into a void). These pairings are brilliant and really show both the poet and photographer working as one—but also as individuals.
Jack Shear's photographs have great merit, but they can also be a bit repetitive—one of the drawbacks to black and white perhaps? The majority of what they're doing is concealing and revealing different parts of the body: the stomach, the legs, the shoulder, the left side, and so forth.
All things considered, the poems and photos tie together well. This sort of hybrid/cross-discipline project allows each artist to move in a different direction, to open themselves to new forms or styles. Gander questions what it means to be alone, to have lost someone, and how we can fight our inner selves. He doesn't really give us answers to these riddles of existence, but he's along with us for the journey, and that is sometimes more important.
Review via Virginia Living magazine
Both photography and poetry need the "viewer/reader" to function properly. Poet Forrest Gander, who grew up in Annandale, and photographer Jack Shear's first collaboration, Knot, works doubly hard to provide and elicit meaning from their audience. Not only is there a black and white photo (of a man in various stages of being covered by a black cloth) to observe, but there is a poem to read. The poems (all of them untitled) can be read alone but also in conjunction with the photo. A multiplicity of meanings is a very contemporary factor in literature. This isn't a John Donne or John Keats poem that has a straightforward message to deliver. The reader is a collaborator here.
Many of the poems seem to be more personal interpretations of the images. The first image (also the cover image) is a man holding up a black cloth. Gander makes this into a sort of Romeo climbing to Juliet's balcony—there is also an inescapable Rapuzel allusion to be had. "Haven't I been climbing for Hours," the narrator says. And indeed there seems to be a timelessness, a frozen-in-a-moment quality to the photo. The motion captured in Shear's work gives an interesting incongruity to the static performance of photography. Each is a sort of pause in a long dance where the poet (and the viewer) contemplate.
The collection of poems as a whole does not tell a single story, rather these poems are aligned by common themes. Ideas of "truth" and "self" and "stillness" and "shadows." Gander's topography also changes: some are prose poems, some are dialogues between two characters, and others are lines with white space separating phrases (instead of using enjambment). Not every poem hits the right chord. Several are much too literal, "When he came out, he was dressed I guess as a bat, waving" (p.36) or "A man. A naked man." (p.51); though others are clever: "Only the eyes / of my knees see / where I'm going" (p.35). When Gander makes the poem's speaker a literary character—like Achilles (p.40)—it often has a strong effect. Said poem questions the fleet-footed warrior (and lover) as lost "staring like that into his absence" (and the photo has a man staring into a spread-out cloth, as if into a void). These pairings are brilliant and really show both the poet and photographer working as one—but also as individuals.
Jack Shear's photographs have great merit, but they can also be a bit repetitive—one of the drawbacks to black and white perhaps? The majority of what they're doing is concealing and revealing different parts of the body: the stomach, the legs, the shoulder, the left side, and so forth.
All things considered, the poems and photos tie together well. This sort of hybrid/cross-discipline project allows each artist to move in a different direction, to open themselves to new forms or styles. Gander questions what it means to be alone, to have lost someone, and how we can fight our inner selves. He doesn't really give us answers to these riddles of existence, but he's along with us for the journey, and that is sometimes more important.
June 13, 2023
An energetic and masculine collaboration of poetry by Forrest Gander and photographs by Jack Shear (who was married to the painter Ellsworth Kelly) Unusual in its examination of a man's self. Not stream of consciousness but a consciousness created on the page. The epigraph from Twelfth Night - with its pun of knot/not is spoken by Viola in knots about his/her disguise as a man (I am the man - but not) and the photos seem to play off this question using cloth over the figure's body and to think of states of being as a man. At one point I think the cloth/photo/poem describes the speaker's own shroud. The face always hidden in all the poems/photos. The last line of the book also frames the pun.
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September 15, 2023ah! ekphrasis is something i’ll always seek out. jack shear’s photographs are stunning—i lingered over every page—i felt sometimes troubled by the relationship between poem and image. not that it was obscure, but that it was too blatant. my favorite ekphrastic poetry is not descriptive but additive; for the most part the poems do just that, but there were a few moments… however these poems also ring with power, and the stories they tell feel huge and self-contained, and i loved some of the tonal heel-turns
December 3, 2023
Not exactly a new concept - artsy black and white photo with interpretation on the side. Maybe too artsy for me.
November 14, 2025
Read this for the first time right after reading Twice Alive. It is so good, and on the re-read, it's even better than I remember.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews