Killing Spree

Jorie Graham has long used her remarkably self-renewing gifts to confront the threats posed to the planet and to our humanity. Her recent work – collected in [To]The Last [Be] Human – followed by the acclaimed To 2040 – constitute a wake-up call regarding the ecological, technological, spiritual and political risks we face in the ‘new world’ we are creating. Graham now speaks to that world in 2026, with particular focus on the forces of destruction we have unleashed across the globe. Urgent and unflinching, these poems test how the human spirit might endure under conditions set to undo it. Killing Spree is a book of vigilance and resistance, insisting that imagination and love remain forces of survival. Here, at the height of her powers, Graham offers not consolation but clarity, guiding us through catastrophe toward what cannot be taken from us. One of the most celebrated living American poets – winner of the Forward Prize 2012 and Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 1996 – presents a poetry against numbness, insisting on the need to understand, respond to and act upon political reality in her new collection, as confrontationally titled as it is scrupulously crafted.