Clothbound, 6.75 x 9.5 inches, 64 pages, 23 black and white

The elements are timeless and fundamental—a male nude and a piece of black linen—and the photographic results are miraculous. Within Knot are twenty-three lush black-and-white photographs of a body and cloth performing a provocative ballet, a wrestling match, a tense sequence of appearances and disappearances that immediately take on symbolic weight. When poet Forrest Gander first encountered these images, he asked Jack Shear for more. As Gander recalls, the photographs arrived “dreamy, violent, mythic, and elemental . . . I set them up around the room and knew I wanted to write my way into them.” The result is a profound dialogue between word and image, observation and inspiration, imagination and intellect. “What do you see?” one poem asks. “A divinity wrung from a black cloud.”

About the Authors

Forrest Gander is a writer and translator. He is the author of Be With, the winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Twice Alive: An Ecology of Intimacies, and the novel The Trace, among other books. Gander’s translations include Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwau Nomura (winner of the Best Translation Award), and Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems, a collection of previously unpublished and untranslated poems by Pablo Neruda.

Jack Shear is a photographer whose work emphasizes portraiture and nudes. His work is represented in several permanent museum collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. He has published two previous books, Four Marines and Other Portraits and Short Season: Portrait of a Minor League Baseball Team.