Thomas Gardner – författare

Critics have said that Emily Dickinson has no heirs, that her poetry represents the zenith of the experimental method she developed in the mid-nineteenth century. Thomas Gardner disagrees. In this original study, he takes up conversation with four contemporary writers in whose work he finds an extension or expansion of Dickinson's literary legacy. The book, which includes interviews with Marilynne Robinson, Charles Wright, Susan Howe, and Jorie Graham, is also an intimate look at writers at work and an exploration of the twin forces of influence and originality that animate literary writing. Over the last twenty-five years, writers have returned to Emily Dickinson's work, Gardner argues, powerfully extending what he calls her poetics of broken responsiveness--her demonstration of the way an acknowledgment of limits leads, paradoxically, to a deep engagement with a world beyond our capacity to master or possess. In the hands of our most important poets and novelists, Dickinson's "emptying of the articulate self" has become a potent means of addressing some of our culture's fundamental erotic, religious, philosophical, and social questions. As this book argues in four analytical chapters, and as the interviews that follow each chapter strikingly dramatize, Dickinson still matters. The conversation brought to the surface here opens up the work of a number of our most distinguished contemporary writers and makes newly visible the Dickinson that will most matter to writers and readers over the next several decades.

Jorie Graham is one of the most important American poets now writing. This first book-length study brings together thirteen previously published essays and review essays by many of the major critics currently interested in her work and five new essays commissioned for this volume. Commenting on each of Graham's eight poetry collections, these essays encompass the range of critical thought that her work has attracted, both surveying it broadly and engaging closely with individual poems. This collection is sure to become the crucial first step for all future work on Graham and on American poetry of the last two decades.

What makes evidence admissible or inadmissible in court? You'll know the answer once you read CRIMINAL EVIDENCE: PRINCIPLES AND CASES, 9th Edition. Whatever your future career in the justice system, you can count on this book to outline all you need to know about criminal evidence and its use. Packed with stories and cases as well as the most up-to-date legal information available, it's the most relevant and engaging resource of its kind.

Equipping you with a solid understanding of legal topics, Gardner and Anderson's CRIMINAL LAW, 13th Edition, delivers comprehensive coverage of the major components of substantive criminal law in a remarkably reader-friendly presentation. A student favorite for more than 30 years, the text uses a more narrative, descriptive approach -- with fewer lengthy cases -- to expose you to the language of the law without bogging you down in legalese. You'll find compelling coverage of the issues and principles driving American criminal justice today, with a presentation that combines current concerns and cases with an accessible writing style and study system to help you build a practical understanding of complex legal topics.

Thomas Gardner artistically describes Jesus - ""the Word made flesh"" - as a poem penned by God for the world, and John - author of the Fourth Gospel - as the poem's interpreter. John's structural patterns, repetitions, and narrative interventions invite readers to experience for themselves the beauty of the divine poem. John in the Company of Poets deepens this invitation by re-imagining the biblical text through the eyes of such artists as Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wendell Berry, and T. S. Eliot, offering a literary reading of the Gospel based upon their powerful poetic replies. Poets are our best readers, contends Gardner, and his deft analysis forges a fresh path into the issues and tensions of John's Gospel.

Continuing the work begun in 2014’s Poverty Creek Journal, the lyric essays in Thomas Gardner’s Sundays focus on moments in our ordinary lives when something within us breaks and we are cast out to wander and sing, “feeling [our] way toward something [in the invisible] that will press back.” “Deep within us is a river, under it all, where everything comes undone,” Gardner writes, and over a year’s-worth of Sundays, in an improvisatory prose that “holds its breath at its [own] undoing,” he takes us there, urging us each to find that same space opening within. Twenty turkeys in the backyard, a walk with friends from overseas to a plunging waterfall, moments in the dark when flashes across the eye become a boat in rising wind tugging against its mooring—these lyric pieces, much like the sentences from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping Gardner discovers one morning pasted on the doors and windows and staircases of the building he works in, offer us pieces of the ordinary set apart, “tiny squares of print, unfixed from narrative,” so carefully tied together under the surface that the everyday world, like Gardner’s building, seems everywhere “ringed and veined with thought.”