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From The New World
Poems 1976-2014


February 2015
304 pages
$29.99 (Hardcover)
ECCO Press / HarperCollins

Purchase this book: [USA] [ES / EU] [ebook]



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.

From the early poems set in Tennessee and Kentucky, to the expansive embrace of the poet's childhood Rome or the Normandy of the Second World War, to the explorations of myth, art, faith, technology, and ultimately the fate of the planet itself—whose imperiled beauty and intricate complexity few poets have so powerfully confronted and celebrated—the book brings us face to face with our “New World.” Our unprecedented historical, social, and ecological crises, reshaping life as we have known it, both in our persons and on the globe, rise in all their terror and deep mystery from these pages. How are we to be responsible, the book asks; how attend to drastic disappearance and still love? Graham's deeply sensual description, intellectually bold lyric action, and her ever-evolving musical and formal inventiveness have for decades now brought us an urgent report from a dazzlingly charted world—now ecstatic, now sober, always electric. We finally have, in one volume, the stunning story she has written to keep both art and the human spirit instantaneously yet enduringly alive.