The Gobi of Was

Author: George Kalamaras

Publisher: Black Square Editions (2025)

George Kalamaras’s The Gobi of Was challenges conventional ways of seeing/knowing/speaking, moving through time and language as if through a sieve. Drawing on his long-term engagement with Surrealism, Kalamaras’s startling images and juxtapositions move across time and space in ways that plumb the depths of the unconscious, helping to re-imagine the Gobi Desert as not just physical geography but also as a landscape within, replete with emotional and psycho-spiritual meaning. Commenting on this book, Andrew Joron writes: “George Kalamaras appears to be the chosen vehicle for words wanting to cross the Great Divide. . . . Never far from eros, never far from humor, Kalamaras’s words know dislocation as a homecoming. They go crying into that lush desert: The Gobi of Was.” And Jennifer Militello says, “These poems offer us the risk of the vivid, the rapture of the strange. The Gobi of Was serves as a den for the incongruous, with reel after reel of cinematic, tender grit. . . . Kalamaras remains a master of his particular mantra of startle and surprise, and he might be speaking of his own poems when he says, ‘Every word was a time-strict salt shaker of Brahms.’ This book barbs with its duende and sparks with its pairings.” The Gobi of Was asks the reader to journey with the poet across the vast unknown, with the assurance that his caravan of words and images lead us not just through the desert of self-discovery but more deeply into the journey itself.