Killing Spree

A new collection from the Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, a poet who "has engaged the whole human contraption" (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 remained ambitious and reckless, each book addressing the world anew.

Graham is a poet in the vein of the modernists, Wallace Stevens in particular: philosophical in approach, yoking together a world of things finely observed and that immaterial realm neither beneath nor beyond it, distinctly alive to the present. Environmental devastation, aging, loss, and political instability appear in Killing Spree, transfigured in a manner in which they might be both timeless forces and distinctly of the 2020s. Here is a poet taking stock of the world around her, looking to the literary traditions that have shaped her work and finding herself, despite it all, at the height of her powers. Jorie Graham is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, including To 2040 and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974–1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her work has been widely translated and is the recipient of multiple awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Forward Prize, the Nonino International Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Wallace Stevens Award. She has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.