LITTLE GLASS PLANET

Purchase from Graywolf Press.

“Gibson is masterful with imagery. [His] writing is smart and crisp.” —The Washington Post

“Exuberant, electric, and frank.” —BuzzFeed Favorite Books of Spring 2019

“[These] 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

“Charmingly funny.”—Publishers Weekly

“Idiosyncratic and memorable, Gibson’s poetry will reward readers even through its moments of anguish.”—Library Journal

“Poems are thoughtful and humble. Some are not easy. All are worth reading.”—The St. Paul Pioneer Press

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

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

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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