Killing Spree: Poems

A new collection from the Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, whose “great body of work . . . has so much in it, more of life and of the world than that of almost any other poet now writing” (The New York Times).

In a review of her first book, Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts (1980), The New York Times heralded Jorie Graham as a “poet of large ambitions and reckless music.” In the fifteen collections that followed, she has sought to remake the lyric’s ability to capture our recklessly disintegrating and accelerating daily realities. Now, in perhaps the most unflinching book of her long career, Graham explores how the human spirit, in the face of everything that threatens it, might navigate the rapids of extreme change. In these newly spare poems she enacts, with exquisite formal precision, how we might remain intact under conditions—ecological, political, technological—set to destroy what we've come to know as our world. Can we lose our humanity, these poems ask, Can it be taken from us, Will we surrender it without resistance?

Extraordinary and haunting, Killing Spree reads like a survival manual guiding us deftly through the cataracts of a runaway climate, tipping-point violence, and out-of-control technology, into a terrain where a defiant, powerful imagination (and love) of the world reveals itself. Here is a poet truly at the height of her powers.