{"title":"Books by Jorie Graham","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781800173163","title":"To 2040","description":"Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize 2024               Winner of the Laurel Prize 2023               A 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?'","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43205562564786,"sku":"9781800173163","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781800173163.jpg?v=1786026793"},{"product_id":"9781800172937","title":"[To] the Last [Be] Human","description":"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","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43205587861682,"sku":"9781800172937","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781800172937_c21328af-1f43-4cbe-b734-555a21b10f06.jpg?v=1786026783"},{"product_id":"9781784109950","title":"Runaway","description":"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'.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56304599957877,"sku":"9781784109950","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781784109950_9091208c-9a32-4c92-ab21-d2d13272a359.jpg?v=1786025938"},{"product_id":"9781847771940","title":"The Taken-Down God","description":"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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307850936693,"sku":"9781847771940","price":14.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781847771940_2bd49c98-5edf-4729-8930-df8d0d359724.jpg?v=1786029028"},{"product_id":"to-2040","title":"To 2040","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eIt is rare to find in one collection an entire skyline burning and the quiet to follow a single worm, to hear soil breathe\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003ein Jorie Graham's fifteenth poetry collection, you do.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJorie Graham’s fifteenth poetry collection,\u003ci\u003e To 2040\u003c\/i\u003e, opens in question punctuated as fact: “Are we \/ extinct yet. Who owns \/ the map.” In these visionary new poems, Graham is part historian, part cartographer as she plots 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 shows us our potentially inevitable future soundtracked by sirens among industrial ruins, contemplating the loss of those who inhabited and named them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn sparse lines that move with cinematic precision, these poems pan from overhead views of reshaped shorelines to close-ups of a worm burrowing through earth. Here, we linger, climate crisis on hold, as Graham asks us to sit silently, to hear soil breathe. An urgent open letter to the future, with a habit of looking back, \u003ci\u003eTo 2040\u003c\/i\u003e 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. In poems that look to 2040 as both future and event-horizon, we leave the collection warned, infinitely wiser, and yet more attentively on edge. “Inhale. \/ Are you still there \/ the sun says to me.” And, from the title poem, “what was yr message, what were u meant to \/ pass on?”\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57484408652149,"sku":"9781556597091","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781556597091.jpg?v=1786266529"},{"product_id":"killing-spree","title":"Killing Spree","description":"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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57487681159541,"sku":"9781800175549","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781800175549.jpg?v=1786354906"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-jorie-graham.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}