To Order
Andrew C. Gottlieb was born in Ontario, Canada, grew up in Massachusetts, and has lived on the western coast of the United States since 1998. He studied writing, and taught composition and creative writing, at both Iowa State University and the University of Washington. Along with the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, he’s been writer-in-residence in a number of wilderness locations, including three national parks: Denali, Everglades, and Isle Royale. He’s also the author of the chapbooks Flow Variations (Finishing Line Press) and Halflives (New Michigan Press).
Say hello at: www.andrewcgottlieb.com.
Say hello at: www.andrewcgottlieb.com.
Praise for Tales of a Distance
Poetry can speak most resonantly at those times when the distance between our lives and death shrinks, times such as when a parent dies, and we relearn what intimacy in a family context can mean. Such is the beautiful intensity of Andrew Gottlieb's poems in this collection, written with crystalline images and mindful presence. I'm especially captured by how rivers, animals, and landscapes of the American West inhabit the poems as talismans for the inseparability of mind and nature. And for the mystery of how we find beauty while living on the edge of peril.
--Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of A Woven World and Stairway to Heaven
There is scant rhyme but abundant reason to get close to Andrew Gottlieb's Tales of a Distance. Intimacy resides in his far away as comfort winds its way into his wildness. Broken form seems his fix for convention. There's much to admire in Andy's artistry but perhaps most endearing is the invitation the words make to sit and absorb beasts and human beings, the out there and the inside, with equal ease.
--J. Drew Lanham, author of The Home Place and Sparrow Envy
With a pleasant density that is relished and an enacted physicality that is revered, Gottlieb's robust cosmology comes to us via field sermon and tourist canoe, via wheelchair fugue and coyote anthem. Everywhere there is rare sense of the poet having fully inhabited not only locations but his own "inner wild." What is gifted the reader, then, (through formal mastery, it should be added) are not mere snapshots but an elemental authenticity that grounds us, again and again, on the edge of the luminous void.
--Chris Dombrowski, author of Body of Water and Ragged Anthem
“I am grappling with a road I once traveled,” writes Andrew Gottlieb, and with keen perspective and honest reckoning he invites us to travel with him. Between parents and children, fish and fisher, hardscrabble origins and later comfort, here and there, rural and cosmopolitan, now and then. In his search for a moment’s import, Gottlieb has the patience of a fly-fisher untangling a line to lay it back on the rod to be cast again and perhaps catch new meaning. The polished exoskeletons of these poems—beautiful and intricate in their workings—protect a vulnerable, self-aware soul as they sing. This book honors the work of a poet waiting to be sounded by—and sounding—the world.
—Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica and Once Removed
Coyotes and winter vistas, plunging rivers and still lakes and the “salmon's black back”—Andrew C. Gottlieb has a keen eye and ear for the natural world, its vagaries and truths, but perhaps what's even more impressive about this poetic debut is Gottlieb's willingness to speak honestly about pain—his own, his father's, ours—and yet still try “[t]o find belonging / among the wet pebbles shifting in our palm […]. / To try to name the question that memory / always is.”
—Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die, Thieve, and When We Were Birds
Andrew C. Gottlieb’s Tales of Distance is an ongoing confrontation of the past with a sublime attention to the natural world. This stunning, poignant collection reveals the complicated relationship of father and son, the permeability of grief, and a desire for solitude— to follow the hawk, ‘To find belonging / among the wet pebbles shifting in our palm’. Gottlieb’s intimate, lyric poems are vivid and richly cadenced. In the liminal times of dusk, before sunrise, or at midnight, and with the speaker’s gaze on the horizon reflecting on what slips away, here is ‘the distance between trees and loss’.
—Suzanne Frischkorn, author of Fixed Star and Girl on a Bridge
Andrew C. Gottlieb frames his impressive debut with the long perspective, reminding us “lichen may thrive a thousand years.” These poems recognize that the ways we live have consequences, and with a disarmingly beautiful musicality to his language, the poet stages domestic dramas against the backdrop of the more-than-human world of nature. Brutality exists here—“We already know each day brings / its glittering assault”—but the poet continually searches for provisional meaning, offering the possibility of hope for a place where we might plunge “safely into the ragged wildwood.”
—Todd Davis, author of Coffin Honey and Native Species
“Time is not light but layers,” writes Andrew Gottlieb in the opening poem of this remarkable collection. And trace these layers we do, alongside him as he excavates his familial past and the plenty and violence of the natural world. He is a naked witness to fur and feathers, audience to the coyote’s western anthem, watcher of soot and stars and trout and sawgrass. His poems find these layers in the names of things and in the whisper of romance in night’s final landscape. This book is a wonder.
—Jeffrey Thomson, author of Half/Life: New and Selected Poems and fragile: a memoir
--Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of A Woven World and Stairway to Heaven
There is scant rhyme but abundant reason to get close to Andrew Gottlieb's Tales of a Distance. Intimacy resides in his far away as comfort winds its way into his wildness. Broken form seems his fix for convention. There's much to admire in Andy's artistry but perhaps most endearing is the invitation the words make to sit and absorb beasts and human beings, the out there and the inside, with equal ease.
--J. Drew Lanham, author of The Home Place and Sparrow Envy
With a pleasant density that is relished and an enacted physicality that is revered, Gottlieb's robust cosmology comes to us via field sermon and tourist canoe, via wheelchair fugue and coyote anthem. Everywhere there is rare sense of the poet having fully inhabited not only locations but his own "inner wild." What is gifted the reader, then, (through formal mastery, it should be added) are not mere snapshots but an elemental authenticity that grounds us, again and again, on the edge of the luminous void.
--Chris Dombrowski, author of Body of Water and Ragged Anthem
“I am grappling with a road I once traveled,” writes Andrew Gottlieb, and with keen perspective and honest reckoning he invites us to travel with him. Between parents and children, fish and fisher, hardscrabble origins and later comfort, here and there, rural and cosmopolitan, now and then. In his search for a moment’s import, Gottlieb has the patience of a fly-fisher untangling a line to lay it back on the rod to be cast again and perhaps catch new meaning. The polished exoskeletons of these poems—beautiful and intricate in their workings—protect a vulnerable, self-aware soul as they sing. This book honors the work of a poet waiting to be sounded by—and sounding—the world.
—Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica and Once Removed
Coyotes and winter vistas, plunging rivers and still lakes and the “salmon's black back”—Andrew C. Gottlieb has a keen eye and ear for the natural world, its vagaries and truths, but perhaps what's even more impressive about this poetic debut is Gottlieb's willingness to speak honestly about pain—his own, his father's, ours—and yet still try “[t]o find belonging / among the wet pebbles shifting in our palm […]. / To try to name the question that memory / always is.”
—Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die, Thieve, and When We Were Birds
Andrew C. Gottlieb’s Tales of Distance is an ongoing confrontation of the past with a sublime attention to the natural world. This stunning, poignant collection reveals the complicated relationship of father and son, the permeability of grief, and a desire for solitude— to follow the hawk, ‘To find belonging / among the wet pebbles shifting in our palm’. Gottlieb’s intimate, lyric poems are vivid and richly cadenced. In the liminal times of dusk, before sunrise, or at midnight, and with the speaker’s gaze on the horizon reflecting on what slips away, here is ‘the distance between trees and loss’.
—Suzanne Frischkorn, author of Fixed Star and Girl on a Bridge
Andrew C. Gottlieb frames his impressive debut with the long perspective, reminding us “lichen may thrive a thousand years.” These poems recognize that the ways we live have consequences, and with a disarmingly beautiful musicality to his language, the poet stages domestic dramas against the backdrop of the more-than-human world of nature. Brutality exists here—“We already know each day brings / its glittering assault”—but the poet continually searches for provisional meaning, offering the possibility of hope for a place where we might plunge “safely into the ragged wildwood.”
—Todd Davis, author of Coffin Honey and Native Species
“Time is not light but layers,” writes Andrew Gottlieb in the opening poem of this remarkable collection. And trace these layers we do, alongside him as he excavates his familial past and the plenty and violence of the natural world. He is a naked witness to fur and feathers, audience to the coyote’s western anthem, watcher of soot and stars and trout and sawgrass. His poems find these layers in the names of things and in the whisper of romance in night’s final landscape. This book is a wonder.
—Jeffrey Thomson, author of Half/Life: New and Selected Poems and fragile: a memoir