Reviews

Be With by Forrest Gander

hilaritas's review

4.0

Parts of this brief collection of free verse poems are brilliant; the first one comes out of the gate with a bang, and the ones explicitly about his mother and her illness are incredible. A lot of the others are full of stoner mysticism and concatenations of words that are mellifluous but meaningless. I do have to admire Gander's ability to craft short nuggets of beautiful sounds. Even without meter, theme, plot, or meaning generally, he knows how to make words pop. But is that enough to justify publishing? I dunno. I'll rate this highly based on the parts where sense and sensibility converged.