From the New World: Poems 1976-2014

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry

An indispensable volume of poems, selected from almost four decades of work, that tracks the evolution of one of our most renowned contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham.

The Poetry Foundation has named Jorie Graham “one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation.” In 1996, her volume of poetry selected from her first five books, Dream of a Unified Field, won the Pulitzer Prize. Now, twenty years later, Graham returns with a new selection, this time from eleven volumes, including previously unpublished work, which, in its breathtaking overview, illuminates of the development of her remarkable poetry thus far.

In From the New World—Poems 1976-2014, we can witness the unfolding of Graham’s signature ethical and eco-political concerns, as well as her deft exploration of mythology, history, love and, increasingly, love of the world in a time of crisis. As the work evolves, the depth of compassion grows—gradually transforming, widening and expanding her extraordinary formal resources and her inimitable style.

These pages present a brilliant portrait one of the major voices of American contemporary poetry. As critic Calvin Bedient says, “If Graham has proved oversized as a poet in the field of contemporary poetry, it is because she continually recalls the great Western tradition of philosophical and religious inquiry . . . tenaciously thinking and feeling her way through layer after layer of perception, like no poet before her.”

From pulitzer prize winner Jorie Graham, an indispensable volume of poems selected from almost four decades of work

Much awaited and long needed, From the New World—a sequence of poems from Jorie Graham’s prior eleven books—creates a startlingly fresh trajectory through books whose brilliance and far-reaching innovations have been a significant influence on the landscape of contemporary poetry, both in the United States and abroad. Part spiritual autobiography, part survival manual, From the New World tracks what it is to attempt wakefulness in this our unprecedented historical, social, and ecological crisis. Life as we have known it, both in our persons and on the globe, rises in all its terror and deep mystery from these pages. How are we to be responsible, the book asks; how attend to drastic disappearance and still love? We finally have, in one volume, the stunning story Graham has written to keep both art and the human spirit instantaneously yet enduringly alive.

“From the New World is an indispensable addition to any literary library, a tour de force selection of Jorie Graham’s critically important poems to date.”—New York Journal of Books

“Graham’s great body of work, summarized in From the New World, her new career-spanning selected poems...has so much in it, more of life and of the world than that of almost any other poet now writing....Graham is to post-1980 poetry what Bob Dylan is to post-1960 rock: She changed her art form, moved it forward, made it able to absorb and express more than it could before. It permanently bears her mark.”—New York Times

“Graham’s poems make use of all the old lyric technologies, as ancient as the breath and the beating of the heart—rhythm, the managed intervals of line and stanza, the play of language against silence, and the transformations enacted by metaphor—enlisting them to measure a world of spawning complexity and change. But because she finds herself gauged by the world she gauges, a poetry that would seem almost too fine-grained for politics has become, in the past twenty years or so, a sui-generis account of global ills like species extinction and climate change.”— The New Yorker

“Like the greatest filmmakers, Graham is miraculously gifted at tracing those inexplicable moments that carry a thing—a crow, the sun, a snowflake—from stillness to motion, from wholeness to disintegration and back again....I know of no living poet whose work so aligns with their reason for writing; I know of no living poet with a better reason for writing poetry. In Jorie Graham’s vision of a new world, poetry—thought in motion—is faster and more powerful than money, argument, or destruction. Take me there.”—Flavorwire

“Graham’s is the best poetry written in English in the last forty years. The achievement of her verse is not only to make something happen: Graham’s poetry is something happening....We will always need to read Jorie Graham, and to read her closely, if we want to understand the last forty years of poetry in America (as well as abroad, where her reputation is only growing)....From the New World is now the place to start.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“A profile of Graham in The New Yorker places her in the lineage of Eliot, Bishop, and Ashbery rather than William Carlos Williams or Robert Creeley, but it might be posited that her capacious talent now draws on all these examples: the bodiless virtuosity of formal mastery has met the flexibility and passion of the mind and eye at liberty.” - Harvard Review

“A well-curated representation…a long view of the aesthetic development and ethical awakening of one of America’s most important and critically lauded poets…The scale of thought and perception…is a testament to Graham’s work and her willingness to push herself into new territory with each new book.” - Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)

“From the New World is an indispensable addition to any literary library, a tour de force selection of Jorie Graham’s critically important poems to date.” - New York Journal of Books

“Ms. Graham is a central figure in the last four decades of American poetry. Her poems, with their long verse lines and Emily Dickinson-like dashes, are as instantly recognizable as Joni Mitchell’s voice on a turntable.” - New York Times, Dwight Garner

“Legions of poets have been influenced by Pulitzer Prize-winner Graham over the course of her four-decade career... [These poems] display a continued willingness to experiment and push her art in new directions. - Publishers Weekly

We will always need to read Jorie Graham, and to read her closely, if we want to understand the last 40 years of poetry in America (as well as abroad, where her reputation is only growing)…From the New World is now the place to start. - Los Angeles Review of Books

“Like the greatest filmmakers, Graham is miraculously gifted at tracing those inexplicable moments that carry a thing — a crow, the sun, a snowflake — from stillness to motion, from wholeness to disintegration and back again.” - Flavorwire

“I know of no living poet whose work so aligns with their reason for writing; I know of no living poet with a better reason for writing poetry.” - Flavorwire

“Graham’s poetry over the decades hasn’t followed a single line of inquiry; rather, like a universe unto itself, it has expanded, broadened, and deepened its questioning, as though total inclusion were the only way to attempt to apprehend the unfathomable.” - Boston Globe

“In 1995, Graham won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book of selected poetry... her latest effort exceeds that one. . . . These poems detach us from comfortable moorings, leaving us pleasantly adrift. Here is exceptional proof that contemporary poetry retains access to the sublime.” - Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Graham is to post-1980 poetry what Bob Dylan is to post-1960 rock: She changed her art form, moved it forward, made it able to absorb and express more than it could before. It permanently bears her mark.” - New York Times Book Review

“I know of no living poet whose work so aligns with their reason for writing; I know of no living poet with a better reason for writing poetry.” - Flavorwire

“I firmly believe that Graham’s is the best poetry written in English in the last 40 years. The achievement of her verse is not only to make something happen: Graham’s poetry is something happening.” - Los Angeles Review of Books

“The most evident case for Graham’s importance is the volume of chatter eddying around her name. Tune all of that out and the deeper reasons for her lasting reputation grow louder. Graham’s great body of work, summarized in ‘From the New World’ . . has so much in it, more of life and of the world than that of almost any other poet writing now. . . . Graham is to post-1980 poetry what Bob Dylan is to post-1960 rock: She changed her art form, moved it forward, made it able to absorb and express more than it could before. It permanently bears her mark. . . . Graham is one of our great poets. Her words will long outlast all this chatter.” - New York Times Book Review

“Graham is one of our great poets. Her words will long outlast all this chatter.” - New York Times Book Review

“One of our most important purveyors of the form traces her artistic evolution in this collected work, demonstrating herself to be an eloquent observer of nature and guardian of myth.” - O, the Oprah Magazine

“Graham is a wizard at representing spatial environments, no easy task in a verbal art that largely avoids narrative. . . . The poems in ‘From the New World’ are exceptionally responsive to their placement on the page. Though Graham reads the work aloud beautifully, I think of her as a poet best appreciated through silent reading of the printed word. . . . There are four new poems here, among the finest that Graham has written.” - The New Yorker

“Graham is a wizard at representing spatial environments, no easy task in a verbal art that largely avoids narrative. . . . There are four new poems here, among the finest that Graham has written.” - The New Yorker