Be With — Book Summary & Review

Be With is built in three sharply different movements: an elegiac St. John of the Cross version, a long multilingual poem on the U.S.-Mexico border’s geological and cultural history, and then a transcription-like series of poems written as Gander attends his mother’s Alzheimer’s decline. In the first section, Forrest Gander doesn’t treat translation as ornament; he treats it as a way to keep grief from becoming vague. That choice matters because the book keeps asking what intimacy costs when language is failing—first in the mystical register, then in the border poem’s crowded, multilingual attention to place, then in the third section where the “address” to his mother arrives line by line, as if the page is a bedside table and the poem is what’s left when conversation runs out. The second section, with its syncretic focus on the border, reads like a pressure system: history, rock, migration, and language all compete for the same air. Gander’s formal restlessness—his diction, his switching of linguistic textures, his refusal to settle into one tone—feels like an ethical stance: don’t smooth the world into a single voice.

By the time you reach the Alzheimer’s transcription poems, Forrest Gander’s project tightens. He’s not writing a neat narrative of “acceptance”; he’s documenting how reverence can turn into something closer to practical clarity, including the brutal repetition of caregiving rhythms. The limitation is real: if you want a traditional plot, or if you need poetry to stay emotionally legible at every moment, Be With can feel demanding and occasionally opaque, especially in the border section where the poem’s scope outruns most readers’ patience.