Be With

Be with was written after the death of Forrest Gander's wife, the poet C. D. Wright, in 2016, and it moves through grief by way of geology, ecology, and the borderlands between languages rather than through direct, unguarded confession. Gander's diction is rugged and precise, drawn from the vocabulary of the earth, an inheritance of his own early training in geology, and he uses that vocabulary to register fractures in the self the way a geologist might register a fault in rock.

The poems hold loss alongside a continued, careful attention to landscape and kinship, refusing to let grief crowd out the natural world that had always been central to Gander's work. That refusal is deliberate rather than avoidance: Gander has said he eventually stopped reading from the book in public so as not to perform his own grief for an audience, a decision that says something about how the poems themselves are built to hold sorrow privately rather than display it.

Reading Be with means encountering a genuinely elegiac book that never turns loss into spectacle, staying instead with the porous boundary between bodies and ground, the geological time scale set against one specific, recent human death. It suits a reader who wants grief written through the discipline of scientific and ecological language rather than through the more familiar vocabulary of direct emotional address, someone drawn to poems that let restraint carry as much weight as feeling. Even at its most technical, the language never loses its underlying tenderness, since the precision itself becomes a way of paying attention to what has been lost.