Twice Alive

In his latest collection, Twice Alive, Forrest Gander writes: “No one goes on living / the life that isn’t there.” By meditating on the symbiotic relationship between the dead and the living, Twice Alive centers the ways in which bodies collaborate. Gander uses the innocuous lichen as an ecopoetic model because lichen “can’t return to what they were.” Similarly, in poems exploring the verdant mossy undergrowth, we are exposed to unsettled desires and to transformations at the level of the sentence, as if chemically disturbed. Suffused with vitality, Gander’s poems angle toward moisture, light, wind, nutrients.

In the titular poem lichens survive in the “supreme parsimony in drought … sporadic events / of dew and fog, a velvety / tomentum and the wet thallus.” Elsewhere, a mushroom in a forest pops up “with the sort of / gasp that follows / a fine chess move.” These movements are enchanting, enriched by lexicons of botany and spirituality; combined, Gander’s language forms the “low drone” architecture of this book, bringing it to an arousing life multiple times over.

No entity is ever just one thing in Twice Alive. Some poems are interrupted by a dispersion of periods resembling microbial spores contaminating the prose-block. Other poems render words in bold as if they were erogenous pulsing things, transmitting to the reader some gnostic code in the process of “dream[ing] itself awake.” All of this reflects a tactile intimacy, as if the poems themselves belonged to a composite organism or mutualistic colony. With multiple interacting parts, sequences, and repeating titles, Twice Alive often feels as if it is circling back, growing, contracting, branching out into mycelial threads, rhizomatic and hierarchy-resisting in the most organic sense. These gorgeous poems are touching and, at a moment when touch feels precious, to read about the eroticism of contact, and many other synergistic processes, feels electrifying and revelatory.