Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
For this major collection, spanning twenty years of writing (1974-1994), 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.
In these pages we witness the maturation and evolution of a startling and searching poetic voice. The New York Times Book Review described Graham's first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, as announcing "a poet of large ambitions and reckless music."
With each succeeding book, she has enlarged the poems' reach and scope and sought out new thematic and stylistic territory. David St. John, writing in The Los Angeles Times, recognized that, with The End of Beauty and Region of Unlikeness, Jorie Graham "emerged as one of our most highly imaginative and innovative poets." And of Materialism, he said, "[her] speculative and sensual poetry... echoes an aesthetic and cultural past but is, truly, like nothing we've seen before."
To the sizable body of praise for her work, James Tate has added, "Jorie Graham is a poet of staggering intelligence. Her poems are constantly on the attack. She assays nothing less than the whole body of our history reshaping myth in ways that risk new knowledge, fresh understanding of all that we might hope to be."
