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Book Title

Little Glass Planet

Subtitle
Poems
Author 1
Dobby Gibson
Poem Excerpt
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”
 
Body
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.
 

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List Price
$16.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-842-6
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
80
Trim Size
Trim Size
6 x 9
Keynote
 The poems in Dobby Gibson’s new book transform the everyday into the revelatory
 

About the Author

Dobby  Gibson
Credit: Photographer Credit / Zoe Prinds-Flash
Dobby Gibson is the author of Polar; Skirmish; It Becomes You, a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award; and Little Glass Planet. His poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Paris Review, and Ploughshares. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.


http://dobbygibson.com/
More by author

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
    ?
  • “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
     
  • “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
     
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