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Mojave Ghost
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 divisions: 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 confiding tones and candid self-examination, Mojave Ghost is Gander’s most inviting and poignant book yet.
80 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2024
About the author
Forrest Gander
71 books186 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 - 30 of 49 reviews
October 2, 2025
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.
June 28, 2024
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.
Read
December 6, 2024I 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.
January 28, 2025
"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.
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.
November 18, 2024
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.
September 2, 2024
I reviewed this, here: https://northamericanreview.org/open-...
November 3, 2024
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.
November 13, 2024
memory rising up from the desert in animals, whispers, faults
where things sound and do not, where things move and do not
where things sound and do not, where things move and do not
December 31, 2024
3.5 stars. There were some strong poems in here, but interspersed with ones that I felt left something to be desired.
January 21, 2025
So so SO good - beautiful and of the earth
Read
August 8, 2025it’s hard for me to rate poetry, but i really appreciated how the poems’ descriptions of nature, love, and grief intertwined
August 11, 2025
high contender for book of the year
February 18, 2025
real salt of the earth stuff… good read goodreads
November 28, 2024
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."
"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."
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 16, 2025
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.
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.
September 30, 2026
Some luminous lines:
Only in your company do I
concentrate and hold together
like the tightening vortex of a tornado.
*
Because the tree line opens contours of meanings
other than the ones for which we’re prepared,
we treat it with suspicion.
When he smiled and shook his head no, his face
connoted the presumption that you and I live in a different world.
He took us in like the scent of a dead animal.
But how to sustain attentiveness? How to keep
the mind from dropping its needle
into the worn grooves of association?
My art, you said in passing, is nothing much
more than the discipline of an embodied life.
Articulating nuance. The delicate
palette. You paint details
with a tiny brush you made yourself
of hair plucked from your forearm.
They distrust me, you said, because
they can tell I prefer my work to their own.
Which is when I tucked a red anemone
under your pillow to bring you good dreams. What
else did you say?
Fair enough. It is a marriage of equals and without degree.
Your trace on me
like rope marks on the well’s mouth.
Here, have a thought.
As for our misfit status: as Brecht observed,
the palace of canonical culture is built on—
Not to interpret. To feel life course through you.
*
I pour arnica into my palm and
begin to massage the tight cords
at the back of your neck.
*
We find ourselves approaching the edge of a commitment
whose depth we can’t fathom, one that draws us
inward, in pulses, into ourselves, into each other,
into the prismatic intuitions
no blow or grief can erase. As even now
we engender a rhythm of relation
in this extended embrace.
Only in your company do I
concentrate and hold together
like the tightening vortex of a tornado.
*
Because the tree line opens contours of meanings
other than the ones for which we’re prepared,
we treat it with suspicion.
When he smiled and shook his head no, his face
connoted the presumption that you and I live in a different world.
He took us in like the scent of a dead animal.
But how to sustain attentiveness? How to keep
the mind from dropping its needle
into the worn grooves of association?
My art, you said in passing, is nothing much
more than the discipline of an embodied life.
Articulating nuance. The delicate
palette. You paint details
with a tiny brush you made yourself
of hair plucked from your forearm.
They distrust me, you said, because
they can tell I prefer my work to their own.
Which is when I tucked a red anemone
under your pillow to bring you good dreams. What
else did you say?
Fair enough. It is a marriage of equals and without degree.
Your trace on me
like rope marks on the well’s mouth.
Here, have a thought.
As for our misfit status: as Brecht observed,
the palace of canonical culture is built on—
Not to interpret. To feel life course through you.
*
I pour arnica into my palm and
begin to massage the tight cords
at the back of your neck.
*
We find ourselves approaching the edge of a commitment
whose depth we can’t fathom, one that draws us
inward, in pulses, into ourselves, into each other,
into the prismatic intuitions
no blow or grief can erase. As even now
we engender a rhythm of relation
in this extended embrace.
October 14, 2026
I enjoyed the poet’s wanderings in the Mojave Desert and the descriptions of the desert and how he tied his wanderings to his mourning for his departed wife. He writes of a memory of her: “She lifts binoculars to her lined face.” I can see that! This is not as despairing as Tennyson: “Break, break, break,/On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!” It seems more resigned to the sadness that humans have to face. Perhaps he does find some comfort in the desert. As a resident of the American West, I love desert scenery, so to me this setting was so immediate and enjoyable. But besides his mourning, he also writes about himself, or it seems it’s about himself, in life: “The brusque, impersonal, obstinacy of aging.”
Probably the best information in my review that could help you decide whether to read this book is this quote from the author’s note in the book: “Along the desert’s and my own fault lines, I found myself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating my emotions and the stricken landscape with other divisions, the fractures and folds that underlie not only my country, but any self in its relationship with others.”
Probably the best information in my review that could help you decide whether to read this book is this quote from the author’s note in the book: “Along the desert’s and my own fault lines, I found myself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating my emotions and the stricken landscape with other divisions, the fractures and folds that underlie not only my country, but any self in its relationship with others.”
November 13, 2024
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.
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.
October 6, 2026
"What bird wove those sprigs of lavender, mint, yarrow,
and citronella into a nest below our rusted porch light?" (14)
"So what if worlds are boundless? I caught
myself filling with the nonreturnable
particularity of this one afternoon. Squatting
and listening to a desert marigold bloom.
When the hum of an invisible plane
made me suddenly aware of the sprawling
underflow of stillness around me,
it was not loneliness I felt, but
some nevertheless of enchantment.
Those constant bearers of meaning
bore me. I want to open wide now
to the absence of concept, understanding,
representation, to the inward flare
of exhilaration. To the gratuitous
revelation of mineral forces. Isn't the
materiality of this Joshua tree, its living
presence, more than what it means?" (40)
"Someone has spray-painted two orange arrows
in opposite directions across the road
to let the next earthquake
know which way
to go." (65)
and citronella into a nest below our rusted porch light?" (14)
"So what if worlds are boundless? I caught
myself filling with the nonreturnable
particularity of this one afternoon. Squatting
and listening to a desert marigold bloom.
When the hum of an invisible plane
made me suddenly aware of the sprawling
underflow of stillness around me,
it was not loneliness I felt, but
some nevertheless of enchantment.
Those constant bearers of meaning
bore me. I want to open wide now
to the absence of concept, understanding,
representation, to the inward flare
of exhilaration. To the gratuitous
revelation of mineral forces. Isn't the
materiality of this Joshua tree, its living
presence, more than what it means?" (40)
"Someone has spray-painted two orange arrows
in opposite directions across the road
to let the next earthquake
know which way
to go." (65)
January 2, 2026
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.
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.
May 28, 2025
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."
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."
June 24, 2025
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.
"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.
March 22, 2025
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.
November 2, 2024
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.
February 13, 2025
"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."
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."
November 26, 2024
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.
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.
December 30, 2024
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.
April 26, 2025
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.
October 4, 2024
3.5 and rounding up
Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews