Books by Jorie Graham

[To] the Last [Be] Human collects the four remarkable books Jorie Graham has published with Carcanet since 2008, Sea Change, Place, fast and Runaway.

In her first new collection in five years her most exhilarating, personal, and formally inventive 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.

From Erosion:SAN SEPOLCRO Jorie Graham ? . . . . How cleanthe mind is,holy grave. It is this girlby Pierodella Francesca, unbuttoningher blue dress,her mantle of weather,to go intolabor. Come, we can go in.It is beforethe birth of god. No-onehas risen yetto the museums, to the assemblyline bodiesand wings to the open airmarket. This iswhat the living do: go in.It's a long way.And the dress keeps openingfrom eternityto privacy, quickening.Inside, at the heart,is tragedy, the present momentforever stillborn,but going in, each breathis a buttoncoming undone, something terriblynimble-fingeredfinding 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.

The Selected Poems of one of America's most eminent poets.

"e;How I would like to catch the world / at pure idea,"e; 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) "e;Mother's Sewing Box,"e; "e;For My Father Looking for My Uncle,"e; and "e;The Chicory Comes Out Late August in Umbria."e; Finally, the poet's words again: "e;. . . you get / just what you want"e; and (just before that), "e;Just as / from time to time / we need to seize again / the whole language / in search of / better desires."e;--Marvin Bell