Books by Dan Gerber
American Atlas: A Novel
by Dan Gerber
American Atlas brings to the traditional “road” novel an exhilarating breath of fresh air―or perhaps one should say a catastrophic gale. The hero is no penniless wanderer who subsidizes his cross-country trek by stealing chickens and hubcaps. He is Lawrence Bancroft, who starts the novel off with a bang by walking out on his father’s funeral and his position as the heir to a multimillion-dollar pie company. Bancroft wants to be a poet and he pursues his dream across the length and breadth of America, serving up a dazzling portrait not only of the state of the nation but of a man in search of himself.
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Grass Fires
by Dan Gerber
Product Description The varied inhabitants of Brainard, Michigan, examine their lives and losses in very distinct, matter-of-fact voices. A heart attack victim crashes into his brother-in-law’s funeral parlor in the title story; the deaf-mute of “Conversation” begins his tale with the simple sentence, “I don’t think I’ve really had a conversation with anyone since my father died.” Dan Gerber’s characters are capable of extraordinary compassion and everyday cruelty, and reveal themselves in an unnerving series of layers. About the Author Dan Gerber was born and grew up in western Michigan and received his bachelor's degree from Michigan State University in 1962. He has worked as a corporate executive, an automobile dealer, a professional racing driver, and a high school teacher. From 1968 through 1972, with Jim Harrison, he co-edited the literary magazine Sumac. He has traveled extensively as a journalist, particularly in Africa. He has been writer-in-residence at Michigan State University and Grand Valley State College and has lectured, read, and taught at numerous colleges, universities, libraries, schools, and museums throughout the United States and England. He and his wife, Debbie, divide their year between central California and southeastern Idaho.Dan Gerber has published three novels, a short-story collection and six books of poems, including A Last Bridge Home; New Selected Poems and Trying to Catch the Horses. He was the recipient of the Michigan Author Award in 1992, had work selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry 1999, and received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contributions to Midwestern Literature in 2001.
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Trying to Catch the Horses
by Dan Gerber
Dan Gerber's Trying to Catch the Horses is his first full-length collection since his highly acclaimed selected poems, A Last Bridge Home, published in 1992. Many of these fifty-eight poems have appeared in the finest literary magazines and anthologies, including Poetry, New Letters, The Ohio Review, and The Best American Poetry 1999, selected by Robert Bly.
Long recognized as a meditative poet with an almost mystical connection to animals and the natural world, Gerber begins this collection with a quote from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: "Contemplate seeing your bodily form present before you―in the trees, the grass and leaves, the river." In the manner of Rilke and Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gerber's unadorned poems are acts of discovery, inviting us into a place deep within ourselves through a conversation between human consciousness and the consciousness of things. In the title poem "Trying to Catch the Horses," the poet achieves his apparent goal not through will or ambition, but by letting go, to become "a clump of grass they (the horses) must graze," and to reach up and touch "the sky itself as far as it goes." In two of the book's most riveting poems, Gerber focuses his imagination on both our century's World Wars, envisioning a burst of shrapnel as a flight of blackbirds, and questions the entire enterprise of a great battle in the Pacific and how "we never thought / of fish in the sea and how / this was their home though not their war...."
Whether Gerber writes about horses or war, hiking a canyon or encountering a wolf, his backdrop is a profound silence against which these poems become necessary song.
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A Second Life: A Collected Nonfiction
by Dan Gerber
A Second Life brings together several new pieces with the best of Dan Gerber's previously published essays and magazine stories, many of which have appeared in magazines such as Outside, Playboy, Sports Afield, and Sports Illustrated. Gerber limns his experience as a professional racing driver, journalist, sailor, and fisherman with a poet's eye and a novelist's gift for narrative, believing, as he states in his introduction, that our truest lives must be imagined.
New essays in this collection include a meditative journal on the Arctic and an in-depth interview in which Gerber discusses the relationship of his artistic life with that as an explorer of the natural world. Also included are a gripping account of his return to racing thirty-three years after his career-ending crash, a story about saving his own life in the African desert by introducing a clan of Rendili warriors to ice, a chronicle of his pursuit of the most elusive fish in the world, and the story of a clandestine sailing trip to Cuba. His classic and highly praised book on the Indianapolis 500, the World's Fastest Carnival Ride, long out of print, is included here in its entirety.
Blending Thoreau's dictum that "a writer is a traveler who stays at home," with Wallace Stevens's that "it is the worst of all things not to live in a physical world," Dan Gerber's focus in A Second Life is the inward experience of the outer world.
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Departure
by Dan Gerber
The author's second book. A volume of poetry that Dave Etter reviewed in December magazine: "Gerber has learned to write about powerful emotions in a controlled, mature way. He has a sense of place, a poet who knows where he is and what lies behind what he is looking at."
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The Sumac Reader
Sumac was a Michigan-based literary journal founded in 1968 by poets Dan Gerber and Jim Harrison; novelist Thomas McGuane joined the editorial staff in 1969 as the fiction editor. When the inaugural issue appeared, more than 250 American literary magazines were listed in The Directory of Magazines and Small Presses; within three years, Sumac rose to the first tier of these publications and was nationally recognized for its eclecticism and editorial quality. The Library Journal called it "one of the best little magazines now being published."
Remaining true to Sumac's energetic catholicity, The Sumac Reader is an anthology that contains poetry, experimental fiction, and works in translation that originally appeared in the magazine. Contributors include four Pulitzer Prize-winning poets―Galway Kinnell, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, and Gary Snyder―along with Paul Blackburn, Hayden Carruth, Richard Hugo, Denise Levertov, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, and Diane Wakoski. There are early poems by Charles Simic, James Tate, and Michael Waters, as well as a complete section from Galaway Kinnell's classic, The Book of Nightmares. Fiction is represented in Sumac by a first-published Jim Heynen story "Coyote" and early prose by William Kittredge. Translations from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Russian bring to American readers the work of masters such as Tu Fu, Lorca, and Li Po. A variety of poetic forms are represented, including ghazals, narratives, suites, found poems, and the freest of free verse.
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A Last Bridge Home: New and Selected Poems
by Dan Gerber
Poems deal with tragedy, love, family, and nature's variety
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A Last Bridge Home: New and Selected Poems
by Dan Gerber
Poems deal with tragedy, love, family, and nature's variety
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Voice from the River
by Dan Gerber
A wonderful novel of self-discovery through the examined life-in this case, the life of Russell Wheeler, a retired entrepreneur, father, husband (former), lover, reluctant warrior and hunter.
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A Primer on Parallel Lives
by Dan Gerber
Dan Gerber tenderly reels his readers through the beautiful movie’ he calls the passing of time on earth in a language completely unadorned and Zen-like in its quietude. The thing itself carries the weight of these poems, which recall the deep imagery of Vallejo, Neruda and Wright.”Rain Taxi
Gerber’s got a Spanish soul. A bloody, dusty, old Spanish soul. He’s got Machado, Lorca, and Jiménez all rolled up in him. And when he does the lyric, or the meditative, it speaks to the universe and to us.”Line Break
Dan Gerber is a master of layered, bittersweet imagery. In his seventh book of poems, he writes of childhood misgivings and fears, the oak savannah landscape of California’s central coast, and a near-mystical relationship with nature. As novelist John Nichols once wrote of Gerber’s poetry, Dan Gerber has an exquisitely muted, yet profound understanding of tragedy, love, family, and the haunting vagaries of nature.”
Some Distance”
I wanted to be a stone in the field,
simply that,
and then I wanted to be the grass around it,
and then the cattle grazing
under the too blue sky,
and then the blue,
which has of itself
no substance,
and yet goes on and on and on.
Dan Gerber is the author of a dozen books of poetry, fiction, essays, and memoir. He has earned the Mark Twain Award, Book of the Year honors from ForeWord Magazine, and inclusion in The Best American Poetry. He lives in Santa Ynez, California.
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Particles: New and Selected Poems
by Dan Gerber
"Gerber has a gentle touch and an unaffected, articulate voice that can be smart, funny, wise―sometimes all at the same time."―Library Journal
"[Gerber] is one of the most adept and accessible of the poets who explore the meaning of humans' relation with earth and existence itself."―ForeWord
Into a frenzied world that hurtles ever faster somewhere, Dan Gerber's poetry offers a necessary and reflective presence. Drawing upon eight previous collections, and including a book-length selection of new poems, this retrospective tunes its senses to the natural world and a provenance that includes the influence of Buddhism, English Romanticism, and a deep reading of Rainer Maria Rilke's oeuvre. Pastoral and expansive, Gerber's poetry is concerned with the universe just outside each of our windows―the immediately viewable landscape in front of us and the mysterious vastness beyond.
From "Dark Matter":
The visible drapes itself around the invisible,
the way my jacket takes its shape from my shoulders.
An unseen gravity whirls
near the center of our galaxy,
an unseen heart near the center
of the bodies in which we desire.
I seldom think of Neptune out there, way beyond
my pointing to it on a summer night . . .
Dan Gerber is the author of eight collections of poetry, three novels, a book of short stories, and two books of nonfiction. A former professional race-car driver, he has traveled extensively as a journalist, particularly in Africa. He lives in Santa Ynez, California.
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