Runaway Lib/E: New Poems

by Jorie Graham (reader)

A new collection of poetry from one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham In her formidable and clairvoyant new collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not? Keeping pace with the desperate runaway of climate change, social disruption, our new mass migrations, she struggles to reimagine a habitable present--a now--in which we might endure, wary, undaunted, ever-inventive, "counting silently towards infinity." Graham's essential voice guides us fluently "as we pass here now into the next-on world," what future we have surging powerfully through these pages, where the poet implores us "to the last be human."

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

Audio CD

First published September 1, 2020

About the author

Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.

Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Place (2012), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (2005), Never (2002), Swarm (2001), The Errancy (1997), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read Jorie Graham for a long time, and this book spoke to me in a way her last few have not. With its use of meter and short lines and then wildly long-line (almost prose poem) cuts back and forth between minimalist and maximalist. Even sometimes within a long tine poem, terse sentences will form the juxtaposition. The tensions run throughout the text: the self getting away from itself, technology getting away from itself, the climate getting away from itself. Everything seeming to runaway.

[Lydia · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a lot there, some really memorable sections. Think I should have read this one slower, or it would benefit from a second read-- a little experimental and dense, though that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Makes sense that this is so new because the content is very on-the-nose for this year- climate change, what we can expect from the future, the information economy, what love can ultimately sustain. Did gain something.

[Penn Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Runaway is essential to me as a poet. It opens whole areas of consciousness that I haven't seen articulated before! Especially, "WHEREAS AS I HAD NOT YET IN THIS LIFE SEEN": truly transforming in its in/sight! “WHEREAS AS I HAD NOT YET IN THIS LIFE SEEN
stillness. Stillness in time. Rich concentrate. Late summer late-day light. Over but
not on magenta…
shuddering done, no lift or fall, no, no interval, no thought, no whispering of thought,
no. Noticing blends with light. Seeing is light.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m supposed to know who Jorie Graham is, but i went into this book completely blind aside from the fact that Helen Vendler, who I also didn’t know, was a major supporter of her work.

I’m glad I went into this blind, as it made reading this feel like a discovery. These poems are pretty bleak. The perspective isn’t one of a looming apocalypse, but one we’re unwittingly in the middle of. My favorite poem, “From The Transcience”, is a voice seeking a fragmented “I”, only to seemingly reveal it was spoken by a machine. It doesn’t feel gimmicky or sci-fi at all - it’s exceptional.

Highly recommended, but not ideal as a beach read, where I finished it. Strange to be at the gay beach reading a truly bleak collection of poems while men in skimpy bathing suits strut around blissfully.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oscillations between the double line and the dimeter to mark the waves carrying one into the death of the mother and the sense of responsibility for being a pedagogue at the heart of the techno-fascism, the poems reach for silence and past it reach for the tiny scratch.

[Jordan Villanueva · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the type of poetry that makes me feel like I’m not smart enough to read poetry. I found it dense and cluttered, with themes that were sometimes extremely difficult to excavate. This was not the style of language and rhythm that I look for in poetry, and I often found myself zoning out midway through a poem. I can’t say it’s bad, it just definitely wasn’t for me.

[Tatiana · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's Jorie Graham. Shouldn't she be getting the Nobel soon?

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense. There is so much here I need to spend more time to process and understand.

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in Runaway do run away, taking the reader's mind right along with them into the conversation between them and within themselves and at times adressing the reader directly. Clear-eyed, they move in regular stanzas, long lines and/or sentences into minute details. To go into, to forget one's bearings, to feel each distinct part and fall apart, to step out of time, to be in place, to be in apocalyptic time are some of the themes plumbed throughout the collection. And out of these a space and a language unfold. The poetry is as abstract as it is concrete:

"[...]. I
lie on this floor. I feel the wide slats of the old-growth pine along my back. They

push up into my gravity, I think, I push my place down into place, eyes closed I push
down through the subflooring the foundation into grey soil not touched by light in
centuries. I'll break it open now. I'll push into the roots that died when place was
cleared of place. Dismembered roots, here was my zip, my street address. My name."
(last lines of When Overfull of Pain I)

or

"But they are still there on the steps--the money changers. The steps
of evening rise. They want you to exchange. That is the sacrament. Why does he keep throwing them out.
Day after day. Forever. Listen to me, you say, your are going off into
thought, it is not a real road. Take yourself

off the road. He is and is not but he is. And
you are always in the holy place. Because
just being in it makes it holy. Uphold it. Linger. Be eternal for this
instant. [...]"
(from Exchange)

[Amanda Kingston]

"The earth said remember me. The earth said don’t let go, said it one day when I was accidentally listening, I heard it, I felt it like temperature, all said in a whisper... I hear it—I hear it everywhere. The earth said remember me. I am the earth it said. Re- member me."
***
The title references the runaway of climate collapse, the runaway humans do from the responsibility to the climate, and the runaway we are doing for our lives to any sort of survival. Graham packs in a lot to her poetry of the earth and climate certainly as well as our identity, our love, and our future tangled all together. This was a more challenging read for me stylistically, but I really enjoyed it. If you read/have read it, would love your thoughts!

[Simon Sweetman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing writing, a clairvoyant collection. Deep and expansive. And that I didn't understand a lot of it is what ironically pulled me in the most. It's good to learn. Or at least give it a go...

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The poem / is built for this. To come to this limit & see in & fail. It is built for this particular / failure. This wakefulness that wipes out the waking. This muteness which is the / heart of what. It is not silence.” Jorie Graham’s latest volume of poetry, Runaway, presents a sweeping array of sweeping arrays, each poem — even the shorter ones – spanning such breadth and depth at once, covering the literal ground of the page and the ideological ground of Graham’s artistic, existential and emotional philosophising. These are poems saturated with glorious images, sometimes obscure, impenetrable, but often a wall with a hole blown right through it, countless conduits into Graham’s valuable and truly distinctive insight. These are not easy poems by any means, but they reward a reader willing to wrestle, to step into Graham’s intellectual discomfort, to come to terms with all that we know, and with all that we never will.

[Humphrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

The gambit here is choppy, abbreviated syntax with repeated phrases, racing along, thematically across issues of fragmented, uncertain self, duration and fixity (or lack thereof). It's more freewheeling in content than the previous collections, but it combines this with more stable form: long-lined quatrains. It's nominally ecological poetry, but it certainly isn't interested in being nature poetry. A downside of the "runaway" style in this collection is that most of the individual poems are entirely forgettable, even when they have effective moments. There are a couple decent ones - "becoming other," "scarcely there," the title poem, and "it cannot be" - but I'm not sure all of these are memorable either.

[Ben Platt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't quite find a foothold in this collection. The first poem, "All," was genuinely stunning, but I felt unmoored for every poem after, save for a remarkable image occasionally breaking through otherwise quite abstract writing. I generally feel that Graham is at her best when she is oscillating between the material and the spiritual worlds and perhaps this collection was weighted too much toward the spiritual and the speculative for me to latch on to. A reread might be in order someday since I was such a fan of Sea Change: Poems

[cc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Row. Row, thermospasm. Be in
being for now. Brief progeny. Row. Merrily. Gently. Down. The stream will hold you
for now -- machinic and hungry. Pre. Post. No. Where? Reflection is very late. Row

in your amniotic sac -- hope for mud, slime, mold, dust, running water, flame. Rain.
-- "Becoming Other"

I
know I will
have to leave
the earth -- my
difference
looking around
wildly
for where it
ends. That is
life I say
humming,
idling, mind's
engine dozing
in me, its
squint, that
sweet way of
inhaling before
speech while
the hand slides
down the spiral
rail like a
millennium
dappled with
dna and spoor
just right
enough to
end.
-- "Rail"

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5/5 stars)

One day there is no day because there is no day before, no yesterday, then a now, & time, & a cell divides and you, you are in time, time is in you, as multiplying now u slip into our stream, or is it u grow a piece of stream in us, is it flesh or time you grow, how, is it an American you grow, week 28, when we are told dreaming begins. Welcome. Truest stranger. Perhaps one of the last conceived & carried in womb. Father and mother singular and known. Born of human body. Not among the perfected ones yet. No.

The terrain of these poems is intimidating-- long-form, collage-like prose. Yet, there’s a comfort here, too, in the reliable sounds and speeds of each line.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m glad I read these poems. Her structure of poems was interesting and ultimately pretty difficult for me (I’m sure that’s my fault). There are a couple of poems in the middle about birth and a small child that swept me up…but the rest of them I found pretty difficult. I’m glad I didn’t abandon them. They are going to continue to work on me.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The latest book of poems by award-winning poet and Harvard professor Jorie Graham. Vivid prose poems, and Graham has an amazingly vivid way with describing nature. The peoms are divided into 4 sections in the larger volume. (Rating: 4.3/5.)

[C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Runaway is a beautiful poetry collection with the feel of a native American soul. The author reads the audiobook and has an engaging and warm delivery. She covers various topics, and while you may not connect with every poem, you are sure to find moments to smile, relax, and enjoy.

[Dora Prieto · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a new favourite, and one of those special books that not only delights me as a reader, but really gets me writing as a poet. I learn so much from Jorie Graham, on the page and through following her life and poetry journey; what a visionary and permission-giving poet <3

[fer veganda · Rating 5 out of 5]

the rhythm —long long in parts, almost prose, actually changing from verse to prose, could be— trapped me. then, I stayed for the poshuman sense, a pospersona era where our bodies aren't but pixel (as a verb). my first, for sure, not last jorie graham's reading.

[Ross Cohen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ll have to revisit these poems. Throughout most of the book, I had difficulty finding ground. Perhaps I’ll be more comfortable floating in the abstraction the second time around.

[Esmée · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe a little too hard to listen to as an audiobook.
Will try to come back to this later again.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very dense, and kind of depressing. It's like a poetic news report on the state of the world; unfortunately, the news is not good.

[Lisa Keuss · Rating 4 out of 5]

"How easily we wear ourselves as if it is nothing to have origin, whirl, outcome and still be." From Scarcely There

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another classic from a powerhouse writer. It always takes me longer to read her work because it's so dense. The rhythm and cadence of the lines are magical and the word choice is impeccable.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a bit to get the pace of her syntax but by the end I was completely enraptured.

Read my full review on Substack:

https://raliapo.substack.com/p/review...

[The_J · Rating 3 out of 5]

... The perfect is not beauty
Is not a finished thing ...

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not for me.

[lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am full of existential dread now. Thx Jorie. Whiplash also from the sprawling and frantic poems into those that are very spare but still very propulsive. I am full of dread