The poems in Dobby Gibson’s new book transform the everyday into the revelatory
Little Glass Planet
Poems
- “In Little Glass Planet, Dobby Gibson considers a range of objects and systems — from angels and umbrellas to drones and capitalism. Each piece highlights unexpected delights. . . . masterful with imagery and analogy, . . . Gibson’s writing is smart and crisp as he crafts a love letter to the world.”—Washington Post
Can it be true
our primary job
here on earth is to wait?
If there really is another world,
maybe all the languages are there too,
still desperate to perform,
sentences full of bright shards,
straining to shorten distances
by opening up staticky channels.
It’s odd we assume whatever is out there
will be able to understand us
any better than we do.
—from “Trace”
our primary job
here on earth is to wait?
If there really is another world,
maybe all the languages are there too,
still desperate to perform,
sentences full of bright shards,
straining to shorten distances
by opening up staticky channels.
It’s odd we assume whatever is out there
will be able to understand us
any better than we do.
—from “Trace”
Little Glass Planet exults in the strangeness of the known and unknowable world. In poems set as far afield as Mumbai and Marfa, Texas, Gibson maps disparate landscapes, both terrestrial and subliminal, to reveal the drama of the quotidian. Aphoristic, allusive, and collaged, these poems mine our various human languages to help us understand what we might mean when we speak to each other—as lovers, as family, as strangers. Little Glass Planet uses lyric broadcast to foreshorten the perceived distances between us, opening borders and pointing toward a sense of collectivity. “This is my love letter to the world,” Gibson writes, “someone call us a sitter. / We’re going to be here a while.”
Elegiac, funny, and candid, Little Glass Planet is a kind of manual for paying attention to a world that is increasingly engineered to distract us from our own humanity. It’s a book that points toward hope, offering the possibilities of a “we” that only the open frequency of poetry can create, possibilities that are indistinguishable from love.
Elegiac, funny, and candid, Little Glass Planet is a kind of manual for paying attention to a world that is increasingly engineered to distract us from our own humanity. It’s a book that points toward hope, offering the possibilities of a “we” that only the open frequency of poetry can create, possibilities that are indistinguishable from love.
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About the Author
Credit: Zoe Prinds-Flash
Praise
- “Little Glass Planet poems are thoughtful and humble. Some are not easy; all are worth reading.”—Pioneer Press
- “Through his linguistic dexterity and strange juxtapositions, Gibson finds infinite space in the small moments and insignificant objects of the day-to-day. . . . He brings a sharp and clarifying focus to the banal and forgotten details of our lives, details that often get lost in the din of life in an advanced capitalist economy. . . . His poems are stinging, exceedingly perceptive and, most of all, insistent that there is still a grace to be found in the world, if one is willing to see it.”—Shelf Awareness, starred review
? - “Exuberant, electric, and frank; [Little Glass Planet] is a love letter, despite — despite the bleakness of late capitalism, the complicated pull of our many devices, our often terrifying political sphere. There is still so much to love in this world, and Gibson recognizes it in small moments of shared humanity and pockets of the natural world. In Little Glass Planet, he invites us to celebrate with him.”—Buzzfeed Books
- “In [Little Glass Planet], Gibson offers an ode to poetry and the respite it provides from a restless, cacophonous world. A gentle protest of the politics that scorn love and empathy, this book invites the reader to log off from the ceaseless relay of information in order to reconnect with the natural world.”—Publishers Weekly
