Product – Here Below

What if reading poetry could change you—not just what you think, but how you move through the world?

For forty years, Thomas Gardner led students through this transformative act—not analyzing poems from a distance but reperforming them from the inside. Walking together through Elizabeth Bishop’s broken beaches, Robert Frost’s snowy woods, and Emily Dickinson’s rooms of possibility, they discovered that getting lost is how we are found. That acknowledging fragility opens eyes to wonder. That poems, like parables, ask us not to produce definitive explanations but to keep up.

A Place of Encounter is Gardner’s luminous record of this work. Through fifty-one short lyric essays moving between memory, close reading, and theological reflection, he opens up the inner drama of poems as spiritual exercises—spaces where, as Dickinson puts it, our narrow hands are forced wide to gather paradise. With the grace and precision of the poems he loves, Gardner shows how deep reading grooves interior change.

Here is the classroom as temple: bodies leaning forward, voices rising together, readers discovering they’re no longer alone. Here is teaching from a position of faith that speaks across every spiritual commitment. Here is poetry as a place of encounter.

September 24, 2026
9780802885968
$20
Paperback
152 Pages
4.3in x 7in

Reviews

“A Place of Encounter is the testimonial of a great thinker who for decades seems to have thought by teaching, as poets think by writing. And although I have taught for a number of years, reading the book I found it most natural to imagine myself as one of Thomas Gardner’s students. It is one of Gardner’s gifts that his writing is so engrossing as to make one wish one had spent one’s formative years learning from it, and from him.”
—Shane McCrae, author of The Many Hundreds of the Scent

“A Place of Encounter by Thomas Gardner is a radiant collection of short essays that dwell on the interwoven life of soul and body—the ear receiving the body as lived presence, or as a staged play unfolding in many parts; the incarnational act of reading itself. Gardner traces the interior work of a poet’s soul by close-reading a sequence of beloved poems, encountering a vivid menagerie of images: Frost’s birches and woods, Heaney’s bogs, Bishop’s moose and armadillo, Stevens’s sea and singing woman, among many others. Through these meditations emerge sacred moments of surprise and wonder, startling turns of phrase, and honest exchanges with his students—priceless moments of human connection, empathy, and slow, luminous revelation.”
—Karen An-hwei Lee, author of The Beautiful Immunity and Duress

“Gardner’s meditations on a life in and through poetry are like a succession of glasses of the best, cool water on a warm day. As he observes, ‘Poems, like parables, ask us to find ourselves within a certain situation, to move a certain way. They don’t ask if we understand. They ask us to keep up.’ These gentle micro-essays offer a testimony of Gardner’s effort to keep up—and offer to walk with the reader, briefly but indelibly.”
—G. C. Waldrep, author of The Opening Ritual

Praise for Thomas Gardner’s previous work:

“Full of extraordinary and unexpected beauties.”
—Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury

“The most luminous of books. I am stunned at how good it is. Profoundly so.”
—Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian

“Full of grace and truth.”
—Marilynne Robinson

“What a brilliant book! . . . This book offers a chance to spend time with some of the keenest literary intelligence we have. It’s a feast.”
—Robert Hass

“[A] profound meditation on aging and grief, cut through with beautiful Annie Dillard–like observations of the landscape where the author runs.”
—Amanda Parrish Morgan, The Atlantic