Setting out, in September 1800, to define the character of the poet for a new age, William Wordsworth came to the conclusion that good poems could be written only by someone “who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.” Most of us live at the mercy of our routines. We punch the clock, fret over deadlines, and fall into the algorithmic trap of doomscrolling, swiping past headline after headline, reel after reel, each bearing the day’s report of calamity and outrage. We self-soothe with empty calories: The Real Housewives, romantasy, and chill. Wordsworth’s era was different in degree but not in kind. Overwhelmed by news of foreign wars and economic collapse, his contemporaries had been reduced “to a state of almost savage torpor,” living on a toxic diet of “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.”

The poet would have to resist “this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.” He would remind his readers “what is really important to men,” cultivating their capacity for serious, sustained inquiry and moral reflection. At the same time, he would have to remain alert to the catastrophes of the present, which for Wordsworth was defined by the rapid corrosion of traditional ways of life brought on by industrial capitalism. Because the poet feels and sees so much more than others do, because he understands both the historical present and the human condition with greater sympathy and precision than the average person, it is his job to act as our collective psychologist, healer, and sage. (So convinced was Wordsworth of his own powers in this regard that he sent copies of his book to several “persons of eminence,” including the prominent politician Charles Fox, hoping to convince them to do something about poverty and social collapse, about the destruction of English forests and the metastatic “spreading of manufactures” across the land. Fox replied that he liked the poems that rhymed, the blank verse not so much.)

It would be hard to find a contemporary American poet who embodies the Wordsworthian ideal as fully as Jorie Graham. Her work, shaped and driven by its own “more than usual organic sensibility,” pursues an essentially ethical impulse to reinvigorate our perception of the world, to wean us from exhausted and exhausting habits of mind and train us in vital new ones. It is allergic in equal measure to stupidity and cruelty, and as compassionate toward its readers as toward the figures, both human and animal, that populate its lines. A good way to summarize Graham’s project might be to say that she, like Wordsworth, is ever alert to the fact that the root of aesthetics is aesthesis, or sensation, and that poetry is concerned first and foremost with, in his words, “the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men” and “the moral sentiments” arising from them.

In 2022 four of Graham’s recent books were published together in the collection [To] The Last [Be] Human, a climate change quartet that gives itself the painful task of bearing witness to present-tense grief at the disappearance of normal weather and to the anticipatory terror of a ruined future. The poems in those books are rich with prosopopoeia, a rhetorical device whereby a nonhuman entity is given the power of speech. “The earth said/remember me,” one of them begins. “The earth said/don’t let go.” Graham obeys her own elegiac imperative, put in the mouth of an abstract yet eerily intimate presence, and gives herself over to the lyric memorialization of birds, trees, grass, potable water, “cod larvae” that will not hatch, their lives aborted by rising ocean temperatures. She fulfills the mandate of her title: If we are to be the last humans, we must also be human to the last, using our species’ unique capacity for meaning-making to mourn what we might have avoided losing but have lost all the same.

In Killing Spree, her latest collection, Graham’s notes change to tragic. Her laments are now laced with fury, as genocidal wars and murderous technologies join global warming in the twenty-first century’s third decade. Most appalling to Graham is our collective inertia, not to say apathy. The world “didn’t change much/at first,” she writes in the book’s first poem, and neither did we. “Where is everyone,” she asks, before being met by a terrifying stillness, at once the silence of mass death (“Only just heard/no one survived”) and the stupefaction or indifference of those who feel, for now, untouched by mounting crises. For all its characteristic restraint and formal diligence, Killing Spree is a book that wants to make noise, to cut through the dead air with cries of grief and rage, undoing our own savage torpor. Graham knows that it might make no difference; poetry, as we are often reminded, makes nothing happen. But she also knows that a difference—even just a minor variation in what we notice and how—is the only thing a poem can make.

Born in 1950 as Jorie Pepper, Graham is the daughter of the journalist Curtis Bill Pepper and the acclaimed sculptor Beverly Stoll Pepper, whose large-scale creations in iron and stone can be found all over the world, from the town of Assisi in central Italy to Barcelona, Calgary, and New Jersey. Graham studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and filmmaking at NYU before earning her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, to which she returned to teach; in 1999 she became Harvard’s Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. (She was the first woman to occupy the position, which she held until 2025.) Graham is, to say the least, decorated, the recipient of innumerable awards and honors. Thirty years ago a volume of her poems called The Dream of the Unified Field won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for which her fifteenth book, To 2040 (2023), was also a finalist.

According to the late critic Helen Vendler, Graham began “as a writer of short poems in short lines, lines with a hesitant rhythm so seductive that one’s heart, reproducing those poems, almost found a new way to beat.” Her style then changed or, to use Vendler’s word, broke. “With a burst of almost tidal energy,” Vendler wrote, Graham started composing “long poems in long lines, poems that pressed toward an excess nearly uncontainable by the page.” In the American poetic tradition, the long line is most closely associated with Whitman, who used it as a wildly self-expressive and hortatory form. But while she likes the long line, Graham is equally interested in the figurative possibilities of orthography. Her lines are sliced and diced by ellipses, brackets, abbreviations (“yr,” “&”), blanks, elongated underscores, rightward arrows, and most notably em dashes, whose prosodic as well as rhetorical possibilities remain essential to her form.

The em dash is Graham’s most recognizable poetic device. To speak technically for a moment, the em dash introduces a caesura—a cut or a break—into the line, which naturally suggests a slackening of its momentum, though how long that pause ought to last is an open question. Unlike a period, a comma, or a semicolon, the em dash is mercurial in its meaning. It can suggest rupture or connection, and although its visual presence on the page is conspicuous, it also implies something hidden, a thought that will not or cannot be expressed in words and instead makes itself known only through the vocal hitch of a lightly held breath. It is a penumbra, a partial occlusion of sense.

The key word here is partial. The founding conceit of the modern lyric poem is that it gives us unfettered access to the innermost thoughts and feelings of the poem’s speaker, who is often taken (rightly or wrongly) to be the poem’s author. Lyric, in the words of Jonathan Culler, is the “dramatized experience of a consciousness,” neither an argument nor a confession but the record of a mind “attempting to come to terms with the fundamental aspects of the human condition, as embodied in the situation confronting it.” Graham accepts the premise but thwarts its more banal implications. When her dashes appear, it is often to provide a graphic representation of the remoteness and opacity of another person’s mind, to convey privacy where the lyric would encourage or presume disclosure. Here is Graham in her 2017 collection Fast, describing a medical procedure:

my body, my citizen, anesthesiologists back from coffee break, cables
on mylar headrest taking my head down now, arms into armlock,
then positioners, restraints—day talk
all round—the guidewires in, the intravenous ports, the drip begun.
An/aesthesia by which is meant the sensation of having sensation blocked.
a collapse of response, a total lack of awareness of loss of awareness—

on the wall, snapshots of the chosen few training on
                        the new
                        robotic patient-
                        lookalikes

The poem’s title, “Prying,” recasts surgery as a revelation under duress: the doctors do not open up the body so much as snoop and root around in it. Rather than “memories, contritions, facts,” and all the other immaterial things that make a person a person, their quarry is the “rapid over-rhyming cells” of disease. In the face of this incursion—brutal but necessary—the patient retreats into herself as “day talk” buzzes “all round” her, the dashes on either side of that phrase (before “day” and after “round”) affording her a slender, tinny privacy, like the curtain around a hospital bed. A few lines later, the dash signifies the lapse of “awareness” that follows its anesthetic “loss”; in the poem’s last line, “And you get a little extra life to live now—here—can you still live it,” the speaker comes to in the enclosure of “here,” this place where a little more life is available, if she can stand it.

All this is to say that Graham is a poet who consistently confounds her own self-representation, withdrawing from testimony even when she lays herself bare. Not for her the torrential unbosoming of so much contemporary lyric, with its mawkish self-regard and biographical appetites. Dramatizing the experience of one’s consciousness is only worthwhile (or, to use Wordsworth’s phrase, “really important”) if that consciousness is capable of understanding itself as operating within a shared historical condition, independent and idiosyncratic but nonetheless irreducibly in dialogue with other minds or essences. The broken line, the hard scar of the dash—these are gestures toward the uncertain and intractable distance between self and other, presence and absence, “awareness” and its loss.

Graham’s language hovers at a breaking point. It is erudite and self-assured, but it has an underlying fragility that suggests someone trying to hold back a tide of chaos and disintegration. Like Paul Celan, Graham wants to know what it sounds like when meaning gives way to the malignant jabber of history, or when it is so overcome by its own futility that it sinks into silence. Sentences are more often fragmented than not—“Midwinter. Dead of,” begins the poem “Futures”—and almost always elliptical, as if unwilling to impose intelligibility on a world that makes so little sense. Words are left to drift across the poem’s surface like a swan that appears “out of nowhere on [a] drying river,” sick but still floating. The effect produces a kind of frustrated empathy: the reader identifies with Graham’s speaker but also feels impossibly far from her, locked as she is in her own grief for all the dying birds and desiccated waters. The poet’s voice, to borrow a phrase from Celan, is “no one’s voice, again.” Faint but familiar, it is trying to stay with us, in snatches and shards, to speak for as long as it can, to whoever cares to listen.

The voice of Killing Spree is intimate and communal—not a specific person but an exemplary one. “This//first person/I use here,” Graham writes, is “a way of referring/to my being in//abeyance.” Her pronouns tack between “I,” “we,” and “you” or sometimes “u,” and her poems are mostly shorn of what would look like biography: no more dispatches from the hospital ward. Rather, we find ourselves in a nightmarish world peopled by figures with allegorical heft—mothers, fathers, priests, a prime minister “watching a disaster movie.” Like Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette (1992) and, more recently, Annelyse Gelman’s Vexations (2023), Killing Spree represents the experience of living in a dystopia as both intensely isolating and strangely, relentlessly public. The lyric “I” is turned inside out, as private preoccupations are usurped by the collective experience of watching the world burn. “Now and again,” Graham writes in that first poem, “The World,”

          your soul
wakes up in
spurts asking

what is—or is there—a just
struggle. Then you,
then I, cry out
where are you
everyone. We were in one world

& then was it u or
us or them or no one in
particular—in
particular, my heart

leaps at that—oh
in particular

Vendler found Graham’s mode of inhabiting the lyric “magisterially impersonal,” and therefore well equipped to represent “what used to be called the soul”: the part of ourselves that is not reducible to “personal circumstance” but roves freely beyond and even transcends it. In “The World,” the soul is abbreviated by flatulent “spurts” and the text-message shorthand of “u.” It is no longer “particular” but digitized and diffuse, the whole idea of particularity—of an unreplicable uniqueness—becoming something like a memory. There is an obvious allusion to Wordsworth’s poem “My Heart Leaps Up,” written in 1802, the day before the poet composed his more famous “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” As Graham knows, “My Heart Leaps Up” is the easy, innocent overture to the melancholy and complex ode, to which the earlier poem lends its last three lines as an epigraph. In the first poem, the poet rejoices at his own love for nature, at his ability to take unmediated pleasure in the beauty of a rainbow. “So was it when my life began,” he assures us. “So is it now I am a man.”

The ode abandons the trusting singsong of “My Heart Leaps Up” and its blithe faith in what Wordsworth calls “natural piety.” The speaker of this poem recognizes the beauty of “meadow, grove, and stream,” but being an adult beset by all sorts of neuroses, he no longer perceives them with unmixed delight. “It is not now as it hath been of yore,” Wordsworth writes. “The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” Killing Spree likewise situates itself at a time when “there hath past away a glory from the earth,” not because Graham, at the age of seventy-six, is no longer an artless appreciator of the natural world but because nature itself is “no more.” Wordsworth’s “Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves” are being replaced by data centers. “The mountain,” Graham writes in “Then the Fog,” “is cleaved open./The silver is picked out.” “Are those humans out there,” she wonders, “or/just hollows filled with mercury & ash.”

If Killing Spree were merely a lament for a greener, cooler, unpoisoned planet it would still be full of beautiful poems, but it would not achieve the moral sublimity that Graham does. This is a book in which ecocide and genocide go hand in hand, as they do in real life. Several of Graham’s poems appear to be set in Gaza, where war has severely polluted the water and soil. (I say they appear to be set in Gaza although, of course, the location might also be Lebanon or Iran.) “The Zero Point” describes a father in a tent with his son just after the tent is hit by a missile. Graham addresses this father as “you” and also speaks of him in the third person, as if to remind the reader that it is only thanks to an accident of history that she is sitting somewhere in safety, reading a book of poetry, while thousands of miles away some of the world’s wealthiest nations cheerfully drop bombs on refugee camps:

        the zero point
where you call

into the face of
your child
which does not move,
the zero
of its lid you’re pushing up

seeking the gaze—
just look
at me, look
back at me its father is

screaming, the zero
where he only finds
a hand, a part
of the arm, where he picks them up—

…Here’s his foot now

in this dust.
The fire picks it out.
It looks like
it’s running.

Graham may have become known as a poet of long lines, but here her phrases are preemptively slivered, each thought or address (“just look/at me”) cut off before it finds safe passage to its end. Along with that telling movement between grammatical persons, there is the choice to sometimes refer to the child as “it” (as in, “its father”) and other times to make clear that the child is male: the last lines of the poem are “Hold your tongue, fire.//Hold your fire.//Let my boy run.” The shift allows the child to serve, perhaps, as a symbol of all such children—shot, bombed, burned alive—while remaining singular, a child who, like any child, was someone’s entire universe.

“The Zero Point” chimes agonizingly with the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha’s “For a Moment,” published in his collection Forest of Noise (2024). Abu Toha’s speaker carries a young girl in his arms; he knows she is dead (“The pressure of the explosion/tore apart her thin veins”), but “everyone who sees us,” he says, “runs after us.” “You are alive/for a moment,” Abu Toha concludes, “when living people/run after you.” Both poems are part of an emerging body of literature written during the Gaza genocide, and they share certain formal features—that slippage between the first, second, and third person—as well as a thematic emphasis on the fate of children during wartime. Graham similarly counters the paralysis of death with an image of limbs in motion. The little boy’s foot, sheared off his body, looks like it’s running; the crowd runs after the man cradling the dead girl, who, suspended in a collective fantasy of her survival, cannot yet be grieved.

To say that a life is grievable, according to the philosopher Judith Butler, is to recognize that its loss matters. Such recognition is not sentimental but social and political: it decides who counts as part of the human community. But Butler goes further: “Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life.” If our lives do not matter we are not really living; we are enduring, and to uncertain purpose. Graham’s poems grieve not from within the passivity of despair but with the intention of upholding the value both of lives lost and of lives that have not been lived so much as survived. Killing Spree puts into words what many of Graham’s fellow Americans have yet to understand, namely that the condition of being ungrievable—precarious, disposable—in the eyes of those who wield the drones and the jets and the hypersonic missiles might at any moment be shared by those who now feel well cushioned by privilege and security. “No One Today,” a poem whose first line is also its title, begins “of my own died.”

Beloveds

were not dragged

into the net of
the eye of
the drone, were not dis-
membered into

instant ancestors—
not even memories—too
fast, too torn, no. Screams.

Yet despite the speaker’s apparent safety, there is the intimation of being “suddenly” down in

the burning
mounds the slippery
pits—how did our room
disappear—& is that a

cry under there, is that a hand

opening and
shutting—a piece of
skin

“Where//are my things,” the speaker asks, “the/things I loved.” With this utterance she seems tolled back (as Keats says) to her sole self, touching the green of spring grass and reminding herself that “no arm is being/amputated” from the people she cares for, “no rib-//cage crushed,” “no body loved beyond/measure growing//limp here.” But the consolation is a mirage. In the next several lines, the speaker begs some silent other to wake up and let her feed it, give it milk, sing it a song—but this other is dead, the mute addressee of an unwitting apostrophe, its eyelids stuck open, its limbs unnaturally bent.

Amputation is a good word for what this book fears most—not just a physical dismemberment but also the severing of persons from their own humanity. In the twenty-first century the indiscriminate massacre of civilians is joined, almost necessarily, by the evisceration of our lives by technology. It’s not a coincidence that the CEO of the music-streaming service Spotify recently invested $700 million in Helsing, a company that develops AI software for military use. All day, every day, we find ourselves vaporized into data, inscribed into a parodic collectivity in which

We are all breathing here together, are we not?
We are all leaking our in-
formation, our attentiveness….

Connect with me. How many things can we pay attention to at
once. How many. Track me. Track my
proclivities. Harvest me. My gaze is my gift. I give it, I give it to you
freely.

Compare this “gift” with the gaze that is sought and not found in “The Zero Point,” as the father pushes up his dead child’s lids, looking in vain for a sign of life. This is the gaze of one who says, in Graham’s words, “I will be yr/user,” a phrase that is at once erotically charged and bloodless, as are the sinister promises that precede it: “Here is my open eye for you, I will en-/counter you, I will rub the personal surface, I will skim it.” From the eternally open eye of surveillance software to the shuttered eyes of the boy blown to bits in his tent is not a small step; it is not even a step. There is only one kind of machine, and it is built for war.

What is to be done? With its last poem, Killing Spree achieves something like grace—mangled and thin but unfaltering. “Am I//thinking straight/on this page,” Graham wonders, a page “which I can’t hold/anymore, which u/still can?” She asks the reader to “raise yr voice in my voice” or else to “raise my voice in yrs,” for “what remains is//always, only, voice.” This is as strong a claim for poetry as any I have heard, deeply affecting in both its clarity and its desperation. In her final lines, Graham borrows a refrain from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos to reassure us, and herself, that “what thou lovest well/remains,” thus proving Pound’s point that “What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage… What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee.” This century, having taken so much from so many, will go on with its program of graft, plunder, butchery, and terrorism. We should not ask ourselves what we can do to survive it. Instead we should ask, as Graham does, “What have I done” and, more importantly, “Who will I become.” To carry poetry inside us always, to raise its voice, is the beginning of an answer.