Her style once seemed to be casting around for its purpose, but now all her old tics—the twitchy digressions and weird punctuation, the accordion-like contractions and expansions of her lines—are tools she wields with white-knuckle urgency. They allow her to approximate a metastasizing polycrisis that words alone can’t contain ... So much of what’s been written about Graham over the decades has focused on her tendency toward the cerebral... but I think we might do better to understand her as a skillful orchestrator of big feelings. The hellscape she conjures in these pages is grim not just because it’s the poet’s political imperative to make it so, but also because these doomful images allow her occasional gestures of tenderness and grace to move us all the more intensely.
Graham’s 15th collection is perhaps her finest and most profound work yet, revealing such astonishing individuality in the idiosyncratic, elliptical style she has perfected over more than 40 years ... Since the death of A.R. Ammons, no U.S. poet has demanded so much of her reader or offered so rich and mysterious a reward.
These gorgeous, dismaying, and piercing cautionary lyrics are tragic dispatches from a grim possible future spawned by our distraction and hunger for the wrong things ... These poems must be heard.
