Poetry: Be With by Forrest Gander
Forrest Gander is no stranger to the Pulitzer cycle: His last poetry collection Core Samples from the World was a finalist for the Prize in 2012. Now, in addition to being named Publishers Weekly‘s Best Poetry Book of 2018, his latest collection Be With has taken home the top prize. Poets Dan Chiasson, Robyn Creswell, and Rigoberto González served as jury members; the committee called Gander’s book “a collection of elegies that grapple with sudden loss, and the difficulties of expressing grief and yearning for the departed.”
“Gander’s verses have a shattering, symphonic quality, but he uses poetry to locate and dislocate at once, pushing against the borders of meaning or pitching his camp where language estranges itself from sense. There are dazzling fragments, unraveling syntax, poems that, in their ghostliness, also force us to be alert to our own fragile lives,” writes Tess Taylor in the New York Times Book Review.
Poetry finalists: feeld by Jos Charles and Like by A. E. Stallings
