By Michael Brosnan
In a review of Jorie Graham’s 2012 book, Place, Weston Cutter writes: “She’s quite simply doing more, engaging more, with structure than 99.9% of poets presently working. If you read Graham and feel her, the structural tinkering and finickiness ultimately resonates doubly, quadruply — her layout decisions will seem shockingly smart, twitchily incredible, generous to the reader (because of how much it’ll feel like she’s thinking of the poem, of how to make it deliver in as many ways as possible). If you don’t feel her, her moves will likely leave you thinking she’s just trying to play her intelligence across various levels, like she’s showing off.”
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He adds: “Writer friends of mine have said they can get through Graham’s first two books — Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts and Erosion — but thereafter they lose the thread.”
I came upon these comments, and others, after reading and re-reading Graham’s 2026 book, Killing Spree, her 16th poetry book and the fourth that deals with apocalyptic themes. I went looking for the commentary in part because of my own mix of appreciation for, bafflement by, and uncertainty about Graham’s poetry. I thought it might help me to read some other critiques of her writing to make sense of my own response to it.
The general view on Graham’s poetry seems to me to be spot on. She really is writing some remarkable poetry. I would not presume to list her above 99.9% of currently working poets. That kind of ranking feels hollow — and too dismissive of some astonishingly great poets at work today. And, anyway, who has read all the poetry that’s out there? But Graham’s writing, though rarely easy, feels both smart and deeply engaging. In many of her poems, in Killing Spree and elsewhere, you are being asked to feel your way through the world, real or imagined, alongside the poet herself. This way of exploring ideas and emotions is not a new direction in poetry, but it’s one Graham takes further than most contemporary poets I’ve read. We’re not getting the carefully considered brilliant clarity of thought and language that gives shape to so many famous poems — that poetic confidence in a given perspective. But we know Graham is thinking long and hard on her subject and reworking her canvas with deep care, line by line by line break. It’s not the stream of consciousness you get in, say, Alice Notley’s poetry. But you feel the intuitive pulse behind the poems along with the careful structuring of language. You feel the inquiry. It’s where the strength of the poems lie, I think.
The poems in Killing Spree do seem to me to be “shockingly smart, twitchily incredible, generous to the reader.” Graham may be showing off a bit, too, but I admire how she drags us into these metaphysical waters and insists that we swim in the wild currents with her. With its overarching theme of our collective human folly and the weight of moral failings, Killing Spree feels like an important book for our times. On every page, we’re asked to be attentive to what we can and have and will likely lose in our strange and strained relationship to all that is right and morally good. There’s also the underlying question of evil and how it seems to flourish as a kind of cultural cancer that can spread quickly if we look away. The themes cut not just close to the bone, they cut into the bone.
Although it’s not exactly clear what has happened in the book’s imagined world, it’s clear that we’ve been dropped into a post-apocalyptic world. Threaded throughout the poems is that sense of shock at what has happened — not just the violence but also the speed of it. It’s hard to say who is narrating the poems, or even if there’s a single narrator, but we are drawn in by the speaker’s voice in each poem — the hesitant expression of shock, the wish to understand, the regrets about not seeing the changes coming (how could we not see them?), and the general worries, sadness, and pain. Our beautiful world in ruins.
The book opens with “The World.” The poem gives you no time to breathe, since the title is also the opening words of poem. We are told “The World… //didn’t change much // at first.” But then it does. Instantly. What happened? We don’t know. But we know it’s not for the better.
“The World” is such a strange and disturbing poem because the narrator can’t find the words to describe what happened or what she feels about it. Not precisely. We get no concrete images in the poem — just vague references to a world gone wrong, hinting at immense destruction, a ruined atmosphere, the sudden quiet. We are left with lots of questions. “What is it // that is dis;- // possessed. Can it ever be re- // possessed. Never?” The uncertainty is clear in the line breaks. There’s also the unusual decision not to use question marks with all the questions — as if the speaker is simply too tired to bother. Within the poem’s lack of concrete images and the hesitant, questioning language, we are suddenly told “no one survived.” Though that might not be true either. It’s easy to envision the speaker walking about the ruins of civilization in shock — thinking it’s important to document all this. But she is uncertain of what to say or even how to say it.
What I will hold onto in this opening poem is this question aimed at the reader, at the people who make or break a civilization:
Now and again 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…
While the poem does not spell it out, it’s not hard to overlay the effects of catastrophic contemporary events here — the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, the U.S. government’s attack on civil liberties and the rule of law, the inaction on global warming, the rise of fatal diseases and famine, the human-driven extinction rates, etc. What is just? What is right? How exactly do we carry on with all this?
The second poem, “Who,” offers us a bit more of this imagined world. But it, too, leaves you in a state of uncertainty about what happened or is happening. In “Who,” Graham uses her preferred form — widely varying lines, all justified right. I’ve never loved this form, but I understand that it’s her signature move, and I do see that the varied line lengths and sometimes stunning line breaks are engaging and effective.
But “Who” isn’t going to nail things down for us either. It opens with the question: “Who // can still speak from their cage?” It’s kind of a Rorschach test. You can project a lot of your own feelings here about the world. I started by asking questions of the question. What cages are we talking about? Also, what do you mean by “still speak”? Is this a reference to how we live our lives now? Are there people today who speak from their cage? Is that what I’m trying to do now? Or is this a metaphor for our lives in a capitalist society, a way of expressing the bonds and bondage of social living?
While we don’t get answers from the poem, it’s still easy to slide into this harsh landscape and wait for more crumbs and clues. Take the line: “The want to look out failed.” Seems like we’re moving closer to an explanation of the kind of human shortcomings that could account for our enabling of catastrophe. The deliberate and strange construction of the line leaves me thinking either:
We failed to look out for those forces that could, and in the poem did, destroy our fragile community and planet.
Or:
We once did look out for cracks in the moral fiber of society and took steps to repair it. But we somehow lost the desire — and now we’ve laid ourselves wide open to self-destruction.
I don’t know. All I know is that Graham is dragging us into a broken landscape that feels like a real possibility. The narrator is still narrating, which I take as a good thing, but she is also on the verge of giving up:
I do not try to understand what happened.
I do not recall the smell of spring.
It shall not thaw again in my time.
In this Cormac McCarthy kind of world, the narrator is on the precipice of resignation but is able to pull herself back from the edge. In the coming poems we’re encouraged to look more carefully at the moral considerations and fights we need to take up now, while we have the chance to set civilization on a better path.
Throughout the 22 poems, the narrator’s tone rises out of shock into something more determined. You could call all this poetry of witness, I suppose. But the unfolding of feelings and response takes time. In “You Shall Not Speak,” the narrator says: “I must speak // what is in my // heart. I don’t know // if there’s anything left now in // my heart.”
But clearly there is something left. She tells us that we’ve pushed too far — our species “fleshed out, flashed out” — but there’s a sense of hope, too: “know enough then to // sing instead — sing! — and the right song, the surprising one full of // forgiveness.”
We’re offered no details about the killing spree except that it started in the suburbs, but there’s plenty of commentary on politics, journalism, religion, individual responsibility, the kind of stuff we know we can and should improve upon in our current world.
God knows, I’m probably butchering Killing Spree here. I do know that Graham would rather us not pin her writing down with pointed facts and logic. Graham once told the Paris Review:
“I’d say poetry wants to be contagious, to be a contagion. Its syntax wants to pass something on to an other in the way that you can, for example, pass laughter on. It’s different from being persuasive and making an argument. That’s why great poems have so few arguments in them. They don’t want to make the reader ‘agree.’ They don’t want to move through the head that way. They want to go from body to body. Built in is the belief that such community — could one even say ceremony — might ‘save’ the world.”
Anne Carson, winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, said something similar about the goal of poetry. After noting that, as a professor, she focuses on presenting a truth that she hopes you will come to share, Carson said, “The best thing a work of art can do is take your mind with it, moving somewhere that you never expected to move.”
I love this perspective. Still, there’s a part of me that always wants to reach for facts and logic, some truth that will help us pin down the meaning of a poem, and perhaps help us recalibrate how we see life. For instance, I read recently that public opinion shows that while people understand nuclear weapons as a real and present danger, the threat of nuclear war rarely makes our lists of major concerns. This is one of those odd quirks of the human psyche. Because it’s hard to contemplate the damage nuclear weapons could do in a matter of minutes, our minds tend to block out the possibility that it could occur. But the facts are clear: It could occur.
As I read in a review of three new books on the nuclear threat: “Each of America’s fourteen nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines is capable of launching 160 warheads with the combined explosive force of up to 73,000 kilotons, the equivalent of 5,000 Hiroshimas. The Russians possess a similar capability. A mere fraction of the nuclear weapons that exist today could kill millions of people within minutes.” Hundreds of detonations could trigger a nuclear winter resulting in massive disruption to our ability to produce food and thus threaten billions of people worldwide. The rest of nature, of course, would suffer alongside us.
Both the U.S. and Russia have walked away from treaties that would reduce the threat. And both nations are currently led by unstable, manipulative men with the power to launch strikes at their whim. Meanwhile, the world’s 440 nuclear power plants remain likely military targets. On January 27, 2026, the Doomsday Clock, created by an association of atomic scientists, was set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the clock has ever been to midnight in its history.
I don’t know if Jorie Graham had any of this in mind while writing Killing Spree. But for me, to think about the nuclear threat — especially how we subconsciously try not to think about the nuclear threat — while reading Killing Spree helps me understand the kind of global damage Graham imagines here. The catastrophe is not just within the realm of possibilities. It leans closer and closer to a likelihood. Serhii Plokhy, author of The Nuclear Age: An Epic Race for Arms, Power, and Survival, argues that we are in “a more dangerous situation today than we have been since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.” Still, we find a way to live as if it were not really a concern.
I suppose I’m coming around here to say simply: I appreciate Jorie Graham taking on this theme. I get why some people think of her as a difficult poet to read. I feel that way at times. But there’s something powerful and moving about Killing Spree — in subject matter, style, and form. There is also something deeply engaging about Graham’s instincts as a poet — the essential ethical impulse linked to her creative, intuitive, go-for-it rule breaking.
In the end, the narrator asks the two pertinent questions (again without question marks):
What have I done.
What will I become.
In these tipping-point times for humanity and the planet, these are key questions for all of us. And it matters that we have poetry that presses the question of how we best live in relationship to each other and the planet.