“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.
In Place, Graham explores the ways in which our imagination, intuition, and experience—increasingly devalued by a culture that regards them as "mere" subjectivity—aid us in navigating a world moving blindly towards its own annihilation and a political reality where the human person and its dignity are increasingly disposable. Throughout, Graham seeks out sites of wakeful resistance and achieved presence. From the natural world to human sensation, the poems test the unstable congeries of the self, and the creative tensions that exist within and between our inner and outer landscapes—particularly as these are shaped by language.
Beginning with a poem dated June 5th, placed on Omaha Beach, in Normandy—the anniversary of the day before the "historical" events of June 6th—Place is made up of meditations written in a uneasy lull before an unknowable, potentially drastic change—meditations which enact and explore the role of the human in and on nature. In these poems, time lived is felt to be both incipient, and already posthumous. This is not the same as preparing for a death. It is preparing for a life we know we, and our offspring, shall have no choice but to live. How does one think ethically as well as emotionally in such a predicament? How does one think of one's child—of having brought a person into this condition? How does love continue, and how is it supposed to be transmitted? Does the nature of love change?
Both formally and thematically poems of ec(h)o-location in space/time, Graham's new poems work to discern "aftermath" from "future"—as the two margins of the form ask us to feel the vertiginous "double" position in which we find ourselves, constantly looking back just as we are forced to try to see ahead.
In an era where distrust of human experience and its attendant accountability are pervasive Place calls us, in poems of unusual force and beauty, to re-inhabit and make full use of—and even rejoice in—a more responsive and responsible place of the human in the world.
