Harvard Book Store welcomes Jorie Graham—Boylston Chair Emerita at Harvard University and the Pulitzer-prize winning poet—for a discussion of her new poetry collection, Killing Spree. She will be joined in conversation by Stephanie Burt—Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University and the author of fourteen books of poetry and literary criticism, including Super Gay Poems and Don’t Read Poetry.
About Killing Spree
A new collection from the Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, whose “great body of work . . . has so much in it, more of life and of the world than that of almost any other poet now writing” (The New York Times).
In a review of her first book, Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts (1980), The New York Times heralded Jorie Graham as a “poet of large ambitions and reckless music.” In the fifteen collections that have followed, she has remade the lyric’s ability to capture our recklessly disintegrating and accelerating daily realities. In Killing Spree, perhaps the most unflinching book of her long career, Graham looks at how the human spirit—in the face of everything that threatens it—navigates the rapids of extreme change. These newly spare poems explore, with exquisite formal precision, how we might remain intact in the face of aberrant conditions set to destroy our world. Could we lose our humanity, these poems ask. Can it be taken from us, Will we surrender it without resistance?
Extraordinary and haunting, Killing Spree reads like a survival manual guiding us deftly through the cataracts of a runaway climate, tipping-point violence, and out-of-control technology, into a terrain where a defiant, powerful imagination (and love) of the world reveals itself. Here is a poet truly at the height of her powers.
