Jorie Graham on [To] the Last [Be] Human: Poetry

Jorie Graham is the author of numerous poetry collections, including From the New World: Poems 1976-2014, Place, and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her other collections include Overlord, Never, Swarm, The End of Beauty, Erosion, and Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts. She has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language and Best American Poetry 1990. She is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, the first woman to be awarded the position. [To] The Last [Be] Human (Copper Canyon Press) collects four extraordinary poetry books by Graham – Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway – and the work suggests a “lyric record” of the disastrous decades that began the 21st century. But writer and critic Robert Macfarlane noted in his introduction that these poems “sing within themselves, between one another, and across collections,” and that “[…] their tasks are of record as well as of warning: to preserve what it felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when “the future / takes shape / too quickly.”