“Forrest Gander’s poems have life, humor and a pleasant strangeness. They speak of, or rather from, a Japan of the imagination and the American South in sweet and sure androgynous tones. His book will make you laugh while the poems go about their business of printing after-images on your memory.”
—William Corbett

“Gander writes a cool, detached poetry, never confessional or autobiographical…There’s a toughness, a hard edge of danger on the margins of these poems. Gander has a startling way of yoking beauty and violence…”
—The Providence Sunday Journal

“Gander writes with a fascinating opaqueness; his metaphors and narrative touches twist strangely on the page, seem to reflect light back into the reader’s eyes… The Japanese influence that weaves through the poems adds to their opaque, alien quality. But the eccentricities in Rush To The Lake aren’t cross-national or cross-cultural; they inhere in the queer, lyrical properties of Gander’s own mind…I very much like Rush To The Lake.”
—Poetry Flash