LITTLE GLASS PLANET

New full-length collection forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May 2019.

Little Glass Planet exults in the strangeness of the known and unknowable world. Set as far afield as Mumbai and Marfa, Texas, these poems help us understand what we might mean when we speak to one other—as lovers, as family, as strangers. Elegiac, funny, and candid, Little Glass Planet is a 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.

“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

“Gibson's writing is exuberant, electric, and frank; this 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 Favorite Books of Spring 2019

PREVIOUS BOOKS:

It Becomes You

Purchase from Graywolf Press

"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

Purchase from Graywolf Press

“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