LITTLE GLASS PLANET
New full-length collection forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May 2019.
In poems set as far afield as Mumbai and Marfa, Texas, Dobby Gibson maps disparate landscapes, both terrestrial and subliminal, to reveal the drama of the quotidian. Aphoristic, allusive, and collaged, these poems help us understand what we might mean when we speak to each other―as lovers, as family, as strangers. Little Glass Planet uses lyric broadcasts 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.”
“There is nothing like reading poems by Dobby Gibson. No one else writes with such irresistibly odd and goofy generosity, such humble intelligence, such playful, painful, and hilarious compassion. I greet each new book by him with delicious anticipation, saying, first to myself and then to anyone who will listen, this is his best one yet, and here I am doing it again. If you are holding this book, please turn to the title poem, about a fishing bobber, which begins: ‘Little glass planet, / I like picking you up. / As if I’m holding my own thought, / one blown molten with a puff / of some craftsman’s breath—is it still inside you? / You are a beautiful bauble it’s hard to imagine / anyone hurling you into the sea, / but eventually we all have a job to do.’ Indeed. This poet’s job is to hurt my heart and heal it again and again, to be my companion and yours too.”—Matthew Zapruder
PREVIOUS BOOKS:
It Becomes You
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"Poems of grace and invention. . . . In Gibson’s hands the lyric form becomes enlivened. This is his most generous and assured volume to date." — The Believer
“Gibson got noticed for his first two books, which combined a sparky, bizarre postsurrealism with an understated, familiar sadness. This third outing might be his best.” — Publishers Weekly
“Deftly quilts witty observation with moments of lyric intensity.”— Minneapolis Star Tribune
SKIRMISH
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“Poems hum with gloomy humor and the mood of pregnant anticipation one finds in a Paul Auster novel. Gibson is no escapist, though, portraying an anxious America in the new millennium.” — Publishers Weekly
“[Readers] expect not only to be moved but to have a little fun… [Gibson] understands this. In his second book, ‘Skirmish,’ he shakes the reader at every turn.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A smart, clever, pyrotechnical book.” — The Rumpus
POLAR
Purchase from Small Press Distribution
“I have read few more quotable first books … Polar is friendly, yearning, observant, immediately winning and witty.” — Steph Burt, Yale Review
“Teems with a language so alive and so imaginative that one cannot help but read on with wonder and rapture.” — Bloomsbury Review
“Picks up the baton left by Wallace Stevens in his last proper book, The Rock.” — H_NGM_N