Runaway: New Poems

by Jorie Graham

Overview

An NPR Best Book of the Year

A collection of poetry from one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham

In her formidable and clairvoyant collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not?

Keeping pace with the desperate runaway of climate change, social disruption, our new mass migrations, she struggles to reimagine a habitable present—a now—in which we might endure, wary, undaunted, ever-inventive, “counting silently towards infinity.” Graham’s essential voice guides us fluently “as we pass here now into the next-on world,” what future we have surging powerfully through these pages, where the poet implores us “to the last be human.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063036703
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	7.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jorie Graham is the author of fourteen collections of poems. She has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the International Nonino Prize. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

I

All 3

Tree 6

I'm Reading Your Mind 8

My Skin Is 10

When Overfull of Pain I 12

Overheard in the Herd 14

II

[To] the Last [Be] Human 19

From the Transience 22

Prayer Found Under Floorboard 24

Carnation/Re-In 26

Becoming Other 28

Thaw 30

Exchange 33

III

Sam's Dream 39

Sam's Standing 43

Whereas I Had Not Yet in this Life Seen 46

Rail 48

I Won't Live Long 50

Scarcely There 53

Un- 56

IV

The Hiddenness of the World 63

Runaway 66

It Cannot Be 70

Whom Are You 72

Siri U 74

In the Nest® 76

The Wake Off the Ferry 81

Poem 82

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/21/2020

Graham (Fast) begins her fifth decade of publishing with 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. Graham sets the stage in the first line of the opening poem: “After the rain stops you can hear the rained-on.” The poem’s final image is both artificial and natural: “nothing to touch/ where the blinding white thins as the flash moves off/ what had been just the wide-flung yellow poppy.” Other poems include texting abbreviations (“u” and “yr”), and by the end, the reader’s world feels virtual. The second to last poem, “In the Nest,” has the speaker saying goodbye to “Mother”: “I tap/ again only to see your/ face erase itself//...An arrow points/ as I descend again/ into your room/ from the sensor// in your ceiling// watching u./ We think this is/ the past.” The book ends with a plea from the Earth to “Re-/ member me.” Through her signature urgent questioning, Graham makes plain the psychic and physical cost to humans of wrecking the Earth. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Every new book by Jorie Graham is worth reading. . . . Frustrating, frustrated, afraid, panicked, pleading, Graham has once again written the poems of our moment.” — NPR.org

"This engaging, evocative collection from Graham explores the experience of struggle in a rapidly-changing world plagued by existential threats. The poems consider the present and interpret it through a critical eye, carefully mindful of each subject's impact on daily lives. More than anything, the collection invites readers to tap into a deeper state of consciousness." — Chicago Tribune, "Best Books of Fall 2020"

"Challenging as [these poems] are, many of them seem like prayers. For all poetry fans.' — Library Journal

"[Graham's] most thrilling poems hurtle through long, unpredictable lines that devour and spit out ancient echoes and internet detritus as they go...She in her poems remakes a world you can inhabit, one in which you can sense what it is you're letting go of, now, before it's gone."  — Harper's Magazine

“Graham’s 15th collection of poetry has the heightened urgency of a young writer’s debut . . . 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. . . .  Her latter-day poems arrive . . .  like effusions, Whitmanic gusts of words, as if she’s channeling a sort of emergency scripture. Runaway feels as though it has been written for right now...but also for a target audience that might emerge 100 years on.”  — New York Times Book Review

"Jorie Graham’s poetry uniquely portrays the struggle to do the right thing, and above all to find meaning in the world’s “rich concentrate”. Her characteristically questioning work previously engaged with physics, history and personal morality, now turns its attention to accelerating planetary crisis. 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. Graham juxtaposes individual experience with an almost incomprehensible scale of disaster with an urgency and an attention so exceptional it comes out as tenderness.” — The Guardian

"Graham (Fast) begins her fifth decade of publishing with a bravura performance that probes the present for what the future will bring...Through her signature urgent questioning, Graham makes plain the psychic and physical cost to humans of wrecking the Earth." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

Every new book by Jorie Graham is worth reading. . . . Frustrating, frustrated, afraid, panicked, pleading, Graham has once again written the poems of our moment.

NPR.org

Graham’s 15th collection of poetry has the heightened urgency of a young writer’s debut . . . 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. . . .  Her latter-day poems arrive . . .  like effusions, Whitmanic gusts of words, as if she’s channeling a sort of emergency scripture. Runaway feels as though it has been written for right now...but also for a target audience that might emerge 100 years on.” 

New York Times Book Review

"Jorie Graham’s poetry uniquely portrays the struggle to do the right thing, and above all to find meaning in the world’s “rich concentrate”. Her characteristically questioning work previously engaged with physics, history and personal morality, now turns its attention to accelerating planetary crisis. 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. Graham juxtaposes individual experience with an almost incomprehensible scale of disaster with an urgency and an attention so exceptional it comes out as tenderness.

The Guardian

08/28/2020

Pulitzer Prize winner 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. One of the most challenging yet easily the best of the collection, "Sam's Dream," arises from a mother speaking to her unborn child and offers an exquisite meditation on the meaning of birth, life, and maternal love. Throughout, Graham's style relies on ambiguity, mixed metaphors, and repetition (again like Cummings). Her love of wordplay is evident in her title, which implies not just a fugitive (like her father, whom Graham says ran away from his Southern roots) but the out-of-control events the poems chart: climate change, political unrest, her own and her mother's health problems, and her father's death. VERDICT 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. —C. Diane Scharper, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD

Library Journal

"This engaging, evocative collection from Graham explores the experience of struggle in a rapidly-changing world plagued by existential threats. The poems consider the present and interpret it through a critical eye, carefully mindful of each subject's impact on daily lives. More than anything, the collection invites readers to tap into a deeper state of consciousness."

Chicago Tribune

"[Graham's] most thrilling poems hurtle through long, unpredictable lines that devour and spit out ancient echoes and internet detritus as they go...She in her poems remakes a world you can inhabit, one in which you can sense what it is you're letting go of, now, before it's gone." 

Harper's Magazine