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Runaway Lib/E: New Poems

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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."

Audio CD

First published September 1, 2020

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About the author

Jorie Graham

61 books172 followers
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.

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5 stars
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58 (30%)
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48 (25%)
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
Profile Image for C. Varn.
Author 3 books397 followers
February 3, 2021
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.
Profile Image for Penn Kemp.
Author 19 books49 followers
December 17, 2022

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.
Profile Image for Peter.
644 reviews68 followers
May 27, 2024
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.
Profile Image for Lydia.
76 reviews4 followers
October 11, 2020
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.
Profile Image for Jeff.
738 reviews27 followers
September 23, 2020
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.
Profile Image for Jordan Villanueva.
230 reviews3 followers
January 12, 2021
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.
Profile Image for Tatiana.
239 reviews11 followers
June 1, 2021
It's Jorie Graham. Shouldn't she be getting the Nobel soon?
Profile Image for Burgi Zenhaeusern.
Author 3 books10 followers
December 2, 2022
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)
Profile Image for Amanda Kingston.
347 reviews36 followers
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February 24, 2023
"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!
Profile Image for Simon Sweetman.
Author 13 books69 followers
June 19, 2021
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...
Profile Image for Juliano.
Author 2 books39 followers
January 22, 2025
“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.
Profile Image for Ben Platt.
88 reviews6 followers
August 31, 2021
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
Profile Image for Joseph.
48 reviews2 followers
December 12, 2022
(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.
1,328 reviews16 followers
March 12, 2021
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.
Profile Image for Mark.
302 reviews2 followers
November 26, 2020
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.)
Profile Image for C..
Author 11 books48 followers
August 24, 2022
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.
Profile Image for Dora Prieto.
94 reviews3 followers
February 8, 2025
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
Profile Image for Ross Cohen.
417 reviews15 followers
October 4, 2020
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.
Profile Image for Esmée.
690 reviews6 followers
January 12, 2021
Maybe a little too hard to listen to as an audiobook.
Will try to come back to this later again.
90 reviews
February 12, 2021
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.
Profile Image for Lisa Keuss.
234 reviews1 follower
December 28, 2021
"How easily we wear ourselves as if it is nothing to have origin, whirl, outcome and still be." From Scarcely There
Profile Image for Kelly.
Author 5 books12 followers
May 19, 2023
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.
416 reviews18 followers
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June 25, 2022
As a number of reviewers have said, Grahams poems are meaty and dense, brimming with epiphanies. They should be read/listened to slowly and multiple times. And yet, I could help but feel an emotional distance to her poetry that made it at least as difficult to access as their complexity.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews

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