[To] The Last [Be] Human September 6, 2022 336 pages  Poetry $22.00 Copper Canyon Press Purchase this book: [USA] Introduction by Robert Macfarlane [pdf]

​​[To] The Last [Be] Human collects four extraordinary poetry books—Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway—by Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, presenting a body of work that stands as a “lyric record” of the calamitous decades that began the twenty-first century.

From the introduction by Robert Macfarlane:

This glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal is…rife with hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerful to experience. As these poems face our planet’s deep-time future, their shadows are cast by the long light of the will-have-been. Made of more durable materials than granite and concrete, their tasks are of record as well as of warning: to preserve what it felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when “the future / takes shape / too quickly.”…To read these four books in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patterns forming and reforming in mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing within themselves, between one another, and across collections, and the song that joins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of the last book:

          The earth said

         remember me.

         The earth said

         don’t let go,

         said it one day

         when I was

         accidentally

         listening…