Knot - Hardcover

by Forrest Gander (Author), Jack Shear (Photographer)

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Forrest Gander responds to the provocative photographs of Jack Shear.

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 asks. "A divinity wrung from a black cloud."

Author Biography

Forrest Gander is a cross-genre writer and translator and
winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the poetry book Be With (New Directions, 2019).
He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts,
the Guggenheim Foundation, and PEN America. A former professor at Brown
University, Gander currently lives in California.