It is rare to find in one collection an entire skyline burning and the quiet to follow a single worm, to hear soil breathe--in Jorie Graham's fifteenth poetry collection, you do.

Jorie Graham's fifteenth poetry collection, To 2040, opens in question punctuated as fact: Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map. In these visionary new poems, Graham is part historian, part cartographer as she plots an apocalyptic world where rain must be translated, silence sings louder than speech, and wired birds parrot recordings of their extinct ancestors. In one poem, the speaker is warned by a clairvoyant the American experiment will end in 2030. Graham shows us our potentially inevitable future soundtracked by sirens among industrial ruins, contemplating the loss of those who inhabited and named them.

In sparse lines that move with cinematic precision, these poems pan from overhead views of reshaped shorelines to close-ups of a worm burrowing through earth. Here, we linger, climate crisis on hold, as Graham asks us to sit silently, to hear soil breathe. An urgent open letter to the future, with a habit of looking back, To 2040 is narrated by a speaker who reflects on her own mortality--in the glass window of a radiotherapy room, in the first claw full of hair placed gently on a green shower ledge. In poems that look to 2040 as both future and event-horizon, we leave the collection warned, infinitely wiser, and yet more attentively on edge. Inhale. / Are you still there / the sun says to me. And, from the title poem, what was yr message, what were u meant to / pass on?

Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, 2024 Finalist
Griffin Poetry Prize, 2024 Shortlist
Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2023
Library Journal Best Books of 2023
Guardian Best Books of 2023
Financial Times Best Books of 2023
Electric Lit Best books of 2023

It is rare to find in one collection an entire skyline burning and the quiet to follow a single worm, to hear soil breathe--in Jorie Graham's fifteenth poetry collection, you do.

Jorie Graham's fifteenth poetry collection, To 2040, opens in question punctuated as fact: Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map. In these visionary new poems, Graham is part historian, part cartographer as she plots an apocalyptic world where rain must be translated, silence sings louder than speech, and wired birds parrot recordings of their extinct ancestors. In one poem, the speaker is warned by a clairvoyant the American experiment will end in 2030. Graham shows us our potentially inevitable future soundtracked by sirens among industrial ruins, contemplating the loss of those who inhabited and named them.

In sparse lines that move with cinematic precision, these poems pan from overhead views of reshaped shorelines to close-ups of a worm burrowing through earth. Here, we linger, climate crisis on hold, as Graham asks us to sit silently, to hear soil breathe. An urgent open letter to the future, with a habit of looking back, To 2040 is narrated by a speaker who reflects on her own mortality--in the glass window of a radiotherapy room, in the first claw full of hair placed gently on a green shower ledge. In poems that look to 2040 as both future and event-horizon, we leave the collection warned, infinitely wiser, and yet more attentively on edge. Inhale. / Are you still there / the sun says to me. And, from the title poem, what was yr message, what were u meant to / pass on?

A collection of poems by a poet of large ambitions and reckless music. Ms. Graham writes with a metaphysical flair and emotional power.--New York Times Book Review.

Jorie Graham's intricate, sophisticated, and mercurial poems have long been one of the splendors of contemporary American literature. --Village Voice

A poetry collection that shows Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham at the height of her considerable powers

The New York Times has said that Jorie Graham's poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have, and this collection is a reminder of how startling, original, and deeply relevant her poetry is. In Sea Change, Graham brings us to the once-unimaginable threshold at which civilization as we know it becomes unsustainable. How might the human spirit persist, caught between its abiding love of beauty, its acknowledgment of continuing injury and damage done, and the realization that the existence of a future itself may no longer be assured?

There is no better writer to confront such crucial matters than Jorie Graham. In addition to her recognized achievements as a poet of philosophical, aesthetic, and moral concerns, Graham has also been acknowledged as our most formidable nature poet (Publishers Weekly). As gorgeous and formally inventive as anything she has written, Sea Change is an essential work speaking out for our planet and the world we have known.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry

An indispensable volume of poems, selected from almost four decades of work, that tracks the evolution of one of our most renowned contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham.

The Poetry Foundation has named Jorie Graham one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation. In 1996, her volume of poetry selected from her first five books, Dream of a Unified Field, won the Pulitzer Prize. Now, twenty years later, Graham returns with a new selection, this time from eleven volumes, including previously unpublished work, which, in its breathtaking overview, illuminates of the development of her remarkable poetry thus far.

In From the New World--Poems 1976-2014, we can witness the unfolding of Graham's signature ethical and eco-political concerns, as well as her deft exploration of mythology, history, love and, increasingly, love of the world in a time of crisis. As the work evolves, the depth of compassion grows--gradually transforming, widening and expanding her extraordinary formal resources and her inimitable style.

These pages present a brilliant portrait one of the major voices of American contemporary poetry. As critic Calvin Bedient says, If Graham has proved oversized as a poet in the field of contemporary poetry, it is because she continually recalls the great Western tradition of philosophical and religious inquiry . . . tenaciously thinking and feeling her way through layer after layer of perception, like no poet before her.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

For this major collection, spanning twenty years of writing (1974-1994), Jorie Graham has made a generous selection from her five previous volumes of poetry: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, Erosion, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness, and Materialism.

In these pages we witness the maturation and evolution of a startling and searching poetic voice. The New York Times Book Review described Graham's first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, as announcing a poet of large ambitions and reckless music.

With each succeeding book, she has enlarged the poems' reach and scope and sought out new thematic and stylistic territory. David St. John, writing in The Los Angeles Times, recognized that, with The End of Beauty and Region of Unlikeness, Jorie Graham emerged as one of our most highly imaginative and innovative poets. And of Materialism, he said, [her] speculative and sensual poetry... echoes an aesthetic and cultural past but is, truly, like nothing we've seen before.

To the sizable body of praise for her work, James Tate has added, Jorie Graham is a poet of staggering intelligence. Her poems are constantly on the attack. She assays nothing less than the whole body of our history reshaping myth in ways that risk new knowledge, fresh understanding of all that we might hope to be.

[To] The Last [Be] Human collects four
extraordinary poetry books--Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway--by
Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham.

From the introduction by Robert Macfarlane:

The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at
373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts per
million; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. The
body of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of those
eighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, written
from within the New Climatic Regime (as Bruno Latour names the present), rife
with hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerful
to experience ... Graham's poems are turned to face our planet's deep-time
future, and their shadows are cast by the long light of the will-have-been. But
they are made of more durable materials than granite and concrete, they are
very far from passive, and their tasks are of record as well as warning: to
preserve what it has felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when
'the future / takes shape / too quickly, ' when we are entering 'a time / beyond
belief.' They know, these poems, and what they tell is precise to their form....
Sometimes they are made of ragged, hurting, hurtling, and body-fleeing
language; other times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping gift
of the given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a 'whirling robe
humming with firstness, ' there to 'greet you if you eye-up.'

I know not to mistake the pleasures of this poetry for
presentist consolation; the situation has moved far beyond that: 'Wind would be
nice but / it's only us shaking.' ... To read these four twenty-first-century
books together in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patterns
forming and reforming in mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing within
themselves, between one another, and across collections, and the song that
joins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of the
last book:

The earth said

remember me.

The earth said

don't let go,

said it one day

when I was

accidentally

listening...

Graham's poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have. --New York Times

A startlingly original collection of poems from Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham

An extraordinary American artist whom The New Yorker calls a mesmerizing voice, Graham has been placed in the poetic lineage of such masters as T.S. Eliot and John Ashbery.

In Place, Graham explores the ways in which our imagination, intuition, and experience aid us in navigating a world moving towards its own annihilation and a political reality where the human person and its dignity are increasingly disposable. These poems seek out sites of wakeful resistance and achieved presence. From the natural world to human sensation, they investigate the reality and irreducible originality of our inner landscapes. They test the unstable congeries of the self, its ever-shifting vitality, and the creative tensions that inevitably exist within and between its interior and exterior life-particularly as these are shaped by language.

In an era where distrust and evasion of human experience and its attendant accountability are pervasive, Place calls us to re-inhabit and make full use of--and even rejoice in--a more responsive and responsible place of the human in the world.

From Erosion:
SAN SEPOLCRO

Jorie Graham

. . . . How clean
the mind is,
holy grave. It is this girl
by Piero
della Francesca, unbuttoning
her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
to go into
labor. Come, we can go in.
It is before
the birth of god. No-one
has risen yet
to the museums, to the assembly
line bodies
and wings to the open air
market. This is
what the living do: go in.
It's a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
from eternity
to privacy, quickening.
Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
is a button
coming undone, something terribly
nimble-fingered
finding all of the stops.

Jorie Graham grew up in Italy and now lives in northern California.She has received grants from the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.Her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (Princeton, 1980), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award as the best first book of poems published in 1980.

How I would like to catch the world / at pure idea, writes Jorie Graham, for whom a bird may be an alphabet, and flight an arc. Whatever the occasion--and her work offers a rich profusion of them--the poems reach to where possession is not within us, where new names are needed and meaning enlarged. Hence, what she sees reminds her of what is missing, and what she knows suggests what she cannot. From any event, she arcs bravely into the farthest reaches of mind. Fast readers will have trouble, but so what. To the good reader afraid of complexity, I would offer the clear trust that must bond us to such signal poems as (simply to cite three appearing in a row) Mother's Sewing Box, For My Father Looking for My Uncle, and The Chicory Comes Out Late August in Umbria. Finally, the poet's words again: . . . you get / just what you want and (just before that), Just as / from time to time / we need to seize again / the whole language / in search of / better desires.--Marvin Bell

An NPR Best Book of the Year

A collection of poetry from one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham

In her formidable and clairvoyant collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not?

Keeping pace with the desperate runaway of climate change, social disruption, our new mass migrations, she struggles to reimagine a habitable present--a now--in which we might endure, wary, undaunted, ever-inventive, counting silently towards infinity. Graham's essential voice guides us fluently as we pass here now into the next-on world, what future we have surging powerfully through these pages, where the poet implores us to the last be human.

A New York Times Notable Book

An urgent, sweeping collection of poetry from Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham

A fascinating mosaic that explores what it means to live and die at a time when technology is redefining our existence......moving...[an] important book. (The Washington Post)

In her her most exhilarating, personal, and formally inventive collection to date Jorie Graham explores the limits of the human and the uneasy seductions of the post-human.

Conjuring an array of voices and perspectives--from bots to the holy shroud, to the ocean floor, to a medium transmitting from beyond the grave--these poems give urgent form to the ever-increasing pace of transformation of our planet and ourselves. As it navigates cyber life; 3D printed life; life after death; and biologically, chemically, and electronically modified life, Fast lights up the border of our new condition as individuals and as a species on the brink.

A New York Times Notable Book

These poems are among the most intense, personal, and ardent [Graham] has written. --Boston Book Review

The eighth collection of poetry from Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham

T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery--and Jorie Graham. The New Yorker places Ms. Graham in this distinguished line of poets, heralding her as a profound voice in American poetry. In Swarm, she further enhances her reputation with a book-length sequence of verse that is a stunning work of grandeur.

The New Republic writes, for 'swarm, ' in other words...read 'be born again.' Graham is writing about a spiritual turning point, a new beginning.... Beauty--that is, the pure sense-perception which has long been a concern for Graham--is no longer the most important criterion. Now goodness is...[and] the idea of submission, of obedience, without understanding: one must 'yield' before 'hearing the reason' for yielding.

A New York Times Notable Book

Graham is one of those rare poets who not only has created a language and poetic structure all her own, but who seeks to redefine herself with each new book.--San Diego Union-Tribune

In her most personal and urgent collection to date, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Jorie Graham explores questions of existence and presence, of being and otherness.

Set on the coastline known as Omaha Beach in Normandy, the poems in Overlord--the code name for the wartime invasion itself--move between visions of that beach during the Allied invasion and that landscape of beaches, fields, and hedgerows as it known as today.

Overlord meditates on our new world, ghosted by, and threatened by, competing descriptions of the past, the future, and what it means to be, as individuals, as a people, free.

A New York Times Notable Book

Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham returns with great clarity and passion to her lyrical roots--and builds a rich musical meditation on desire.

In these poems, Graham approaches a host of characters, each of them an embodiment of sexual, emotional, political, or spiritual desire--desire searching for its place in an age of betrayed values, an age when dreaming has been rubbed thin by reason, frayed by the speed of facts.

Here error is explored as an heroic form of finding one's way--a wandering toward truth, a pilgrimage guided by the body's strictest longing, here lovers stay alive in sexually-charged encounters; here, too, angels are overheard muttering warnings. Here are Pascal and his wager, Akhmatova and her refusal, and a few soldiers sleeping before a sepulcher while something incomprehensible happens behind their backs.

Provocative in its spirited merging of the sacred and the skeptical, the celestial and the earthly, The Errancy confirms Graham as one of our best, most important poets (Library Journal) and one of the best, and most intelligent, poets in the language (Times Literary Supplement).

Graham's poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have.--New York Times Book Review

A vibrantly focused and intense collection of verse from Jorie Graham, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Dream of the Unified Field.

...I am free to go.

I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.

It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

Deftly meditating on nature, spirit, and imagination, Never showcases one of America's most gifted and respected poets at the height of her creativity. These graceful, probing poems, distinguished by long, meticulously sculpted, almost muscular lines, are among the finest and most innovative compositions in the genre today.