The Gobi of Was by George Kalamaras
George Kalamaras’s The Gobi of Was challenges conventional ways of seeing/knowing/speaking, moving through time and language as if through a sieve. Drawing on his long-term engagement with Surrealism, Kalamaras’s startling images and juxtapositions move across time and space in ways that plumb the depths of the unconscious, helping to re-imagine the Gobi Desert as not just physical geography but also as a landscape within, replete with emotional and psycho-spiritual meaning. Commenting on this book, Andrew Joron writes: “George Kalamaras appears to be the chosen vehicle for words wanting to cross the Great Divide. . . . Never far from eros, never far from humor, Kalamaras’s words know dislocation as a homecoming. They go crying into that lush desert: The Gobi of Was.” And Jennifer Militello says, “These poems offer us the risk of the vivid, the rapture of the strange. The Gobi of Was serves as a den for the incongruous, with reel after reel of cinematic, tender grit. . . . Kalamaras remains a master of his particular mantra of startle and surprise, and he might be speaking of his own poems when he says, ‘Every word was a time-strict salt shaker of Brahms.’ This book barbs with its duende and sparks with its pairings.” The Gobi of Was asks the reader to journey with the poet across the vast unknown, with the assurance that his caravan of words and images lead us not just through the desert of self-discovery but more deeply into the journey itself.
George Kalamaras’s The Gobi of Was challenges conventional ways of seeing/knowing/speaking, moving through time and language as if through a sieve. Drawing on his long-term engagement with Surrealism, Kalamaras’s startling images and juxtapositions move across time and space in ways that plumb the depths of the unconscious, helping to re-imagine the Gobi Desert as not just physical geography but also as a landscape within, replete with emotional and psycho-spiritual meaning. Commenting on this book, Andrew Joron writes: “George Kalamaras appears to be the chosen vehicle for words wanting to cross the Great Divide. . . . Never far from eros, never far from humor, Kalamaras’s words know dislocation as a homecoming. They go crying into that lush desert: The Gobi of Was.” And Jennifer Militello says, “These poems offer us the risk of the vivid, the rapture of the strange. The Gobi of Was serves as a den for the incongruous, with reel after reel of cinematic, tender grit. . . . Kalamaras remains a master of his particular mantra of startle and surprise, and he might be speaking of his own poems when he says, ‘Every word was a time-strict salt shaker of Brahms.’ This book barbs with its duende and sparks with its pairings.” The Gobi of Was asks the reader to journey with the poet across the vast unknown, with the assurance that his caravan of words and images lead us not just through the desert of self-discovery but more deeply into the journey itself.
George Kalamaras’s The Gobi of Was challenges conventional ways of seeing/knowing/speaking, moving through time and language as if through a sieve. Drawing on his long-term engagement with Surrealism, Kalamaras’s startling images and juxtapositions move across time and space in ways that plumb the depths of the unconscious, helping to re-imagine the Gobi Desert as not just physical geography but also as a landscape within, replete with emotional and psycho-spiritual meaning. Commenting on this book, Andrew Joron writes: “George Kalamaras appears to be the chosen vehicle for words wanting to cross the Great Divide. . . . Never far from eros, never far from humor, Kalamaras’s words know dislocation as a homecoming. They go crying into that lush desert: The Gobi of Was.” And Jennifer Militello says, “These poems offer us the risk of the vivid, the rapture of the strange. The Gobi of Was serves as a den for the incongruous, with reel after reel of cinematic, tender grit. . . . Kalamaras remains a master of his particular mantra of startle and surprise, and he might be speaking of his own poems when he says, ‘Every word was a time-strict salt shaker of Brahms.’ This book barbs with its duende and sparks with its pairings.” The Gobi of Was asks the reader to journey with the poet across the vast unknown, with the assurance that his caravan of words and images lead us not just through the desert of self-discovery but more deeply into the journey itself.
About the Author
George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014–2016), is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for thirty-two years. He is the author of many collections of poetry. He has also published a critical study on Western language theory and the Eastern wisdom traditions, Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence (State University of New York Press, 1994). He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, the most recent of which is the 2024 Indiana Book Award for Poetry for his 2023 book from Dos Madres Press, To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me. George and his wife, writer Mary Ann Cain, have nurtured beagles in their home for thirty years, first Barney, then Bootsie, and now Blaisie. George, Mary Ann, and Blaisie live in Livermore, Colorado, in the mountains northwest of Fort Collins.