“Who Was Ever Only Themselves?”— Precocity, Vulnerability, and Interbeing in Forrest Gander’s Be With

Abstract

This article aims to read Forrest Gander’s Pulitzer-winning 2018 volume, Be With, in the context of Judith Butler’s notion of vulnerability and the Buddhist concept of interbeing, introduced by Thích Nhất Hạnh. Gander’s search for a poetics of listening reaches a new intensity in Be With, a poetic lament for a deceased beloved. In this groundbreaking work, grief becomes a means of knowing the world where knowledge is understood “not as recitation but as/ the unhinging somatic event” (Gander 2018, 28). The new way of engaging with the world triggers a subjective reconfiguration that leads to the articulation of a deeply empathic poetics of vulnerability which becomes the basis for telling new stories of human, interspecies, and mineral entanglements.

Keywords

• forrest gander
• ecopoetics
• mourning
• geology
• precocity
• vulnerability
• interbeing
• entanglement
• deep time