Jorie Graham

The Best American Poetry 1990, a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by David Lehman and by guest editor Jorie Graham. —Wikipedia

In her first entirely new collection of poems since Materialism (1993). Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham returns with great clarity and passion to her lyrical roots - and builds a rich musical meditation of desire. In these poems, Graham approaches a host of characters, each of them an embodiment of sexual, emotional, political, or spiritual desire - desire searching for its place in an age of betrayed values, an age when dreaming has been rubbed thin by reason, frayed by the speed of facts. Here error is explored as an heroic form of finding one's way - a wandering toward truth, a pilgrimage guided by the body's strictest longing. Here lovers stay alive in sexually-charged encounters; here, too, angels are overheard muttering warnings. Here are Pascal and his wager, Akhmatova and her refusal, and a few soldiers sleeping before a sepulcher while something incomprehensible happens behind their backs.

The fate of the world rests in the hands of a group of teenagers who have never met.

"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. Much awaited and long needed, From the New World--a sequence of poems from Jorie Graham's prior eleven books--offers more than a retrospect of this major poet's work. This selection, including several revised and new poems, creates a startlingly fresh trajectory through books whose brilliance and far-reaching innovations have significantly influenced the landscape of contemporary poetry, both in the United States and abroad. Graham's unique achievement is surprisingly recast in this illuminating new book, in which the concerns of the later work are seen already urgently pressing in the earliest. From the New World--part spiritual autobiography, part survival manual--tracks what it is to attempt wakefulness in this moment of human history."--Book jacket.

For this major collection, spanning twenty years of writing, Jorie Graham has made a generous selection from her five previous volumes of poetry: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, Erosion, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness, and Materialism.