In our historical moment, the question is not only what poetry can do, but whether it can make experience legible at all. There’s a lineage of writers who have theorized literature’s limits under conditions of devastation ... What makes Killing Spree remarkable is how it operates at that limit, even as bullets and drones whir by. It’s one of the few books of poetry that register the profound struggle of consciousness in our damaged world — poems grasping at what we still call 'human experience,' as its horizon recedes from us.
Killing Spree puts into words what many of Graham’s fellow Americans have yet to understand, namely that the condition of being ungrievable—precarious, disposable—in the eyes of those who wield the drones and the jets and the hypersonic missiles might at any moment be shared by those who now feel well cushioned by privilege and security ... Achieves something like grace—mangled and thin but unfaltering ... To carry poetry inside us always, to raise its voice, is the beginning of an answer.
In this new collection, prevarications turn in on themselves, and any clarity of reasoning is undermined by uncertainty in the very act of the utterance. Sentences simply trail away or scatter into choked fragments. Is this operator error or the result of impossible atmospheric conditions? ... Part of the tragedy that Killing Spree describes is that we behave as if our ability to act is already extinct when it is not. The self-destructive stuttering of the new book reflects the pain and self-hatred of inaction ... Killing Spree occupies the space of the Western tradition’s ultimate last stop: not death but damnation.
Graham’s distinctly formed, austere, elegiac poems are bleak yet elegant and moving in their specificity and mystery as the speaker cherishes memories of a fecund world of bird song, trees, and freedom.
Sets readers down in a strange place, where it is difficult to find one’s bearings. Graham seems to be challenging us to see the present from the perspective of a particular future, one in which there has been some major disjunctions with the present ... The age of tragedy is over, for the time of our agency is passed. Choice is no longer part of the equation. The fabric may be ripped, but we are not doing the tearing. Our hands have disappeared, so we must learn to speak the language of the idle, the powerless.
Language in Killing Spree registers the forces it cannot fully contain ... These are poems that bear witness to the conditions under which witnessing itself turns uncertain — susceptible to being archived, absorbed, rendered inert ... Killing Spree refuses consolation. It refuses spectacle. What it offers instead is a sustained, exacting attentiveness — a willingness to remain within contradiction, within uncertainty, within the slow erosion of moral clarity, without retreating into abstraction. To read this book is to endure the sentence as it unfolds: to follow its turns, its revisions, its hesitations; to feel, within its movement, the strain of thinking under conditions that resist thought.
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 ... Here is a poet truly at the height of her powers.
