Killing Spree: Poems

by Jorie Graham

A new collection from the Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, a poet who “has engaged the whole human contraption” (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 followed, she has remained ambitious and reckless, each book addressing the world anew.

Graham is a poet in the vein of the modernists, Wallace Stevens in philosophical in approach, yoking together a world of things finely observed and that immaterial realm neither beneath nor beyond it, distinctly alive to the present. Environmental devastation, aging, loss, and political instability appear in Killing Spree, transfigured in a manner in which they might be both timeless forces and distinctly of the 2020s. Here is a poet taking stock of the world around her, looking to the literary traditions that have shaped her work and finding herself, despite it all, at the height of her powers.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Hardcover

Published May 26, 2026

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

[Lorren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve learned that for me, Graham’s poetry often requires multiple readings to truly digest. However, on my initial read-through, I was struck by the prescience and poignancy of the poet’s observations and imaginings about our modern world and near future. The content is heavy and at times feels a little too close to home, unsettling in a stirring way. The poem about social media felt the most resonant to my own life and therefore, the most chilling. This is an important work that I will revisit in the future.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this review copy. Opinions are my own.