She knows how to get your attention. As you move through the book...poems like 'I’m Reading Your Mind' and 'Rail' dare you not to get pulled into their riptides. From its opening page until its final lines, Graham’s 15th collection of poetry has the heightened urgency of a young writer’s debut. True to its title, it hurtles forward. Poems pour forth, frothing and pooling and threatening, at times, to overflow their banks ... Runaway taps into a free-floating end-of-the-worldness (is there a German word for that?) that so many of us feel even if we can’t express it ... Runaway feels as though it has been written for right now, especially as we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic, but also for a target audience that might emerge 100 years on. You imagine someone in the future flipping through it, finding a record of a great unraveling, and spending hours trying to decipher it ... the churn of Graham’s language settles into a benediction that couldn’t be clearer[.]

Graham doesn’t allow herself the reveling in ruin and despair that sometimes tempts those who write about apocalypse ... Graham has long been breaking open the lyric voice, seeing how much of the vast, fractured, overwhelming present it can contain ... Her most thrilling poems hurtle through long, unpredictable lines that devour and spit out ancient echoes and internet detritus as they go, returning to unpoetic words such as normal till you feel the hideous adjustments they are hiding ... she in her poems remakes a world you can inhabit, one in which you sense what it is we’re letting go of, now, before it’s gone.

Runaway was completed before the pandemic, but its capacious understanding makes it as able to speak to this as to climate breakdown and global suffering ... She’s not the first to do so ... But she’s doing it with urgency and an attention so exceptional it comes out as tenderness ... Sweeping lines and fractured phrases, ampersands and italics, lines unexpectedly justified right: all of these wake us up to 'the freshness of what’s / there.'

The poems in Runaway maintain the usual dynamism and brilliance of Graham’s past collections, which, taken together, constitute an incisive and reverent study of the depths of human truth and mortality. Runaway, in a sense, leaps ahead of the pack, mimicking its title. The collection is Graham’s examination of a world that feels new again, a meditation on the poet’s newfound cluelessness in our rapidly changing world. It’s a collection for the moment, filled with the urgency of a poet’s debut work, and rife with a consistent sense of rushing, of tripping over one’s own words ... a work cleanly broken up into four numbered sections—perhaps as counterweight to the frenetic energy within the poems themselves—Graham gives us a sensation of flooding, of running over, of words pooling and collecting as lines pulse and gather momentum while moving quickly down the page and into one another ... A master of experimental language ... crushing.

Wilfully, the poems careen along, overflowing the conventional boundaries of lyric. They are challenging both to read and to write about. Attempting to comment briefly on this visionary commotion is like trying to capture thunder and lightning in a bottle ... In every way this collection is capacious. Most of the poems consist of long breathless lines, often enjambed according to principles which are both metrically and semantically elusive. There seems no compelling reason why many lines should end where they do, or end at all. The entire collection feels like one long poem, in fact: the interludes between the poems can seem as arbitrary as the line breaks ... Graham’s headlong pace often eludes affective response, so that the reader struggles to recuperate meaning in the poem’s wake, exhausted and disoriented ... The reader may be tempted, sometimes, to simply give up; or else she may skim along the surface, propelled by the poems’ speed. This isn’t work that lends itself to being savoured. And yet prosaic these poems are not ... Strenuous, mannered, sometimes beautiful, Runaway is at all times apocalyptic and alarming. Any consolation to be found here has the radiance of a relic ... Even occasional breaks in the harshness are disheartening ... Graham is most effortlessly herself in her expansively vatic and apocalyptic mode. The range of her references is part of her power. In this bleak post-human landscape, it is startling but reassuring to find epigraphs by Tennyson and Donne, a poem 'after' Edward Thomas, and numerous echoes of Hopkins ... The scale and authority of the long lines sometimes recall Whitman, but we are also in a realm we recognize from Beckett. This is a world beyond humanity, beyond nature, beyond culture, and yet amid the ruins there is the undeniable triumph and power (albeit a useless power) of poetic utterance. Perhaps Runaway could use some pruning. But one doesn’t edit prophets, and this collection feels like a belated prophecy – not so much a prediction of a burnt-out, excoriated, digitized world to come as an evocation of that world – a world already in existence.

... Graham’s new poems lounge across the page, the words split, scarred, filleted from their sentences, if there were sentences to begin with. Graham has always been an aficionado of daredevil risk-taking, yet her work, no longer grounded in art and literature, has become a pleasure garden of shiftless dilly-dallying. Her bravery is tattooed with hubris; and each new book seems cursed like Milton’s Satan, every abyss concealing a deeper abyss ... Her poems have all the old sprezzatura, that of Seurat first dabbling at a canvas. Graham’s pointillism, however, seems increasingly pointless as the poems go fluttering into the misty reaches of Nowheresville ... A few poems in Runaway arrive with lines so truncated they can’t catch a breath; but most are so long they’d test the patience of a saint, going on for twenty or thirty syllables and printed in a type so small even a mouse would need a magnifying glass to read them ... One of the greatest modern novels is full of such guff, and it’s riveting. Graham’s no Joyce, unfortunately, her staccato ruminations no more attractive if you hold them upside-down and try to parse them in a looking glass. The poems pretend to skim off thought like scum off a pond, but manner alone rarely makes brain work gripping, just as conversation transcribed never achieves the crisp attention of speech purveyed by novelist or scriptwriter. Realism has its point, a point reached when the reader runs screaming from the room ... Alas, too many poems descend into wild-eyed ranting ... The politics aren’t deep—they’re more of the o tempora, o mores variety...Graham makes you wish stream of consciousness had never been invented ... The poems so often suffer from terminal rambling, that even if you decipher her intention the method’s so hectoring that after a few lines you feel oxygen deprived ... the few good lines here make you long for her early work. Not a poem in Runaway would have been worse had it ended after a single page.

Graham’s poems are like those of John Donne and E.E. Cummings but on speed dial. Like Donne, Graham seeks to encounter the metaphysics of everything. Like Cummings, she writes high-spirited lines with little punctuation, which, although confusing, makes the words move fast. Her use of enjambment serves to quicken the pace of these collage-like, metaphysical poems. In addition, most of her poems are long-lined, which make them seem perhaps more difficult than they are ... Donne’s phrase 'the vale of soul-making,' quoted by Graham in an interview, aptly suggests the terrain of these poems; challenging as they are, many of them seem like prayers. For all poetry fans.

... a bravura performance that probes the present for what the future will bring. In four sections of long-lined poems, many of which run two-to-four pages in length, moments that are seen, felt, and processed dazzle the reader ... Through her signature urgent questioning, Graham makes plain the psychic and physical cost to humans of wrecking the Earth.