Jorie Graham – författare

"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

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.

Shortlisted for the ASLE-UKI Book Prize for Ecological Writing 2021 A new collection of poetry from one of our most renowned contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham.In her formidable and clairvoyant new 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 Poetry Book Society Special Commendation Autumn 2022. [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, 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, 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".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 saidremember me.The earth saiddon't let go,said it one daywhen I wasaccidentallylistening

Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize 2024Winner of the Laurel Prize 2023A Publishers Weekly, Guardian, The Irish Times, Financial Times and Telegraph Book of the Year To 2040 begins with question masquerading as fact: 'Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map.' These visionary new poems reveal Graham as historian, cartographer, prophet, plotting 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 exposes a potentially inevitable future, sirens sounding among industrial ruins. In sparse lines that move with cinematic precision, we pan from overhead views of reshaped shorelines to close-ups of a burrowing worm. Here, we linger, climate crisis on hold, as Graham invites the reader to sit silent, to hear soil breathe. 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. 2040 as both future and event-horizon: the reader leaves the book warned, wiser, attentively on edge. 'Inhale. / Are you still there / the sun says to me'. The title poem asks, 'what was yr message, what were u meant to / pass on?'

Jorie Graham has long used her remarkably self-renewing gifts to confront the threats posed to the planet and to our humanity. Her recent work – collected in [To]The Last [Be] Human – followed by the acclaimed To 2040 – constitute a wake-up call regarding the ecological, technological, spiritual and political risks we face in the ‘new world’ we are creating. Graham now speaks to that world in 2026, with particular focus on the forces of destruction we have unleashed across the globe.Urgent and unflinching, these poems test how the human spirit might endure under conditions set to undo it. Killing Spree is a book of vigilance and resistance, insisting that imagination and love remain forces of survival. Here, at the height of her powers, Graham offers not consolation but clarity, guiding us through catastrophe toward what cannot be taken from us.One of the most celebrated living American poets – winner of the Forward Prize 2012 and Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 1996 – presents a poetry against numbness, insisting on the need to understand, respond to and act upon political reality in her new collection, as confrontationally titled as it is scrupulously crafted.

'There’s a taut urgency throughout... joy and humour too... These poems testify to the resilience of the artists, and the role that poetry still has to give voice and bear witness in times of crisis' Rishi Dastidar, GuardianA deeply moving poetry anthology exploring loss and survival by Palestinian writers living in Gaza and the West BankYou Must Live brings together some of the most remarkable poets living and writing in Palestine today, from renowned international prize winners to talented emerging voices.Composed over the past few years and gathered under desperate conditions, these poems, which appear in the original Arabic alongside English translations, are haunted by the long spectre of occupation, transforming laments for lost family, friends and places into a new vision of home. This is a poetry of witness and profound lyric imagination, attuned to the hidden beauty of the natural landscape, the music of sparrows under crowded skies, the electricity of complex desire, daring to conceive a dazzling future beyond dispossession and military siege.You Must Live is the latest entry into the rich tradition of Palestinian poetry, negotiating the interplay between aesthetics and politics, the individual and the collective, to provide a glimpse into the full interiority of Palestinian life. 'A light beam of a collection in our dark hours...This is a landmark work, a center from which myriad new ways of thinking and being will flourish' Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky With Exit Wounds

Acclaimed as one of America’s most passionate and intelligent innovators, Jorie Graham writes poems of luminous formal beauty. Here she selects from the five books that preceded her 2012 Forward Prize-winning collection P L A C E, presenting European readers with a coherent and compelling body of work. The book complements her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Dream of the Unified Field (1996), which selected work from her first five books. Jorie Graham’s poems address a planet spinning towards an unknowable future. They challenge us to inhabit a more responsive and responsible place in language and the world. Her poetry is as urgent as it is essential.