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

[Aimee]

“It feels like the moon has been full for years.
It won’t go back down.”


Really fascinating exploration of desolation and the fundamental collapses (political, philosophical, social) of our age. For Graham, civilization is not rotting, as that would imply some kind of gradual degradation and disappearance. Rather the meat has already been picked from the bone and the bone itself has been bleached in the sun and we’re only just now noticing processes that are no longer processes just dumb facticity and end. One of the more interesting images here is that of the killing spree itself, anthropomorphic and ceaselessly hungry, a kind of self propelling violence that is free of both victims and perpetrators and rather just is as such. Also formally interesting are the savage line breaks and alternations between extremely long and extremely short lines as well as many many parentheticals, some of whose winding structures take up entire stanzas or poems. All this contributes to the almost breathless tone and deeply bleak mood of the collection. There are slight moments of levity, or if not levity, then the possibility of escape through poetry and the imagination. However these moments were mildly unsuccessful in changing the atmosphere of the collection from one of deep grief and mourning. Graham is significantly more comprehensible here then in some of her earlier work but that is honestly not really saying much. She might be MORE plainspoken here but this is hardly easy poetry, and comprehension such as it is is more so carried by the really relentless atmosphere of the collection. But this might be a good place to start for those unfamiliar with Graham.

[Jaden Ellison]

Jorie Graham as savior, essentially. She will save us. This was a quite natural extension of “Runaway” and “To 2040.” Its preoccupations with a sort of digital-apocalypse as product of fascist uprising really work—and her answer, here, is not as psychologically involved as “Runaway” might have been. Graham begssss for action! For collectivity. “Runaway” offers a solution that begins with the singular and ultimately, through enacting en masse self-critique, hopes for legitimate change. Here, she’s aware of what we’re actually up against. Her inclinations are for specificity—say the time, bring in the items which actually surround us in this world, acknowledge the stakes placed upon the individual and work from there. “Runaway,” begins from Graham’s observance of a generational phenomenological crisis, “To 2040,” begins from the suspicion of grander depth within that crisis—starting to admit Graham’s confusion regarding what exactly is going on (“With whom am I speaking, are you one or many, what are u”) and “Killing Spree” allows Graham to solidify her footing—she’s answered these series of questions, she’s figured it out, and writes from there. Really enamored—the sparks of personal history, the importance of personal history, as engine for empathetic capacity, reallllly took me. Some faulty moments where I could just feel more thought existing on the page—but slightly rare instances. Wrote down favorite passages, here:


“Where will it go, where will it be buried / my time, / will it rise up in no one ever again / as memory, as dream, / this moonlight’s scent over the fields & in it / the barefoot steps of my father / coming to see if I am / asleep.”

“Then the lists started… someone started to keep
track… / Of whoever wanted to return / to nature. Of / what to buy, what to fear. / Then someone who raised a flag up their new pole, / said they needed the flag / in order to feel the wind. / Then the day for triaging the-imperfect-among-us came. / Everyone was walked out to the field. They were surrounded. No one cld look / away. / Eventually the quiet returned. / Later the soldiers lounged in the churches / careful not to slip. / They pocketed the relics. It was allowed. They burned / the silver icons down / to tiny pools. I can still see them. They weighed it all.”

“We are all leaking out in- / formation, our attentiveness. I do not want to look / away, I will not look / away, I want to promise, / I will be / saturated, here is my open eye for you, I will en- / counter you, I will rub the personal surface, I will skim it. Oh it is / frictionless. I will be yr / user. Connect with me. How many things can we pay attention to at / once. How many. Track me. Track my / proclivities. Harvest me. My gaze is my gift, I give it to you / freely. I / scrutinize. / What are you drawn to. / What are you drawn to. / I want to feel autonomous. I will pay u / attention. I will / feel free. I will / feel free. / Track me.”

“The years break & they are / replaced. The event organizer imagines himself a vision seeker. / He says their flesh must be useful. / It is a sacred gift. / No point in wasting it. / They will learn to give it willingly. / That becomes policy. / Becomes theology. / For a time it is almost law. / Then for a time it is God’s law. / The priests observe the men from the heights of the earth, they look down into the depths, / they conclude it is not hell, / it is a system of production. / We go on.”

[NY Sled]

How can a book of poems give you vertigo or whiplash? The landscape is undefined, barren and scarred, there are drones, battles, demonstrations, disappearing and disappearances, found body parts, environmental loss (when was the last time you saw trees/stars?, there used to be birdsong), blindness, fleeing, the need to escape, to hide, to shelter, a giant disembodied hand in the sky that rolls dice, there are mass graves, a burning smell on the wind, the massacre is still "hot in the field". In the title poem, the narrator says "We are so late in this story, unable to tell our heroes from our tormentors . . ." Another narrator observes, "It feels like the moon has been full for years. It won't go back down." This book is a critique of militarism/authoritarianism, of digital consumerism ("massacres happen during express check out" or "Track me." or "here comes the harvest, that delirium, the crashing of want into more want"), the failure of the media/the written word, of blind following ("I bet you do not think. Let the years float. Abandon memory . . . Estrange."). These poems are whirling and relentless, with a controlled jitteriness to them, deeply felt, the merciful mixed with the unforgiving. There are echoes of Prospero, Saramago, Roethke, Revelation. There is an ongoing tension between silence and voice, the poet struggles mightily ("But they have erased my hands, I think"). As one of the poems says, there is a trial going on in the narrator's heart. Despite all I've said, the poems are not apocalyptic, they are strangely grounded, they perfectly capture the cataclysm of our present day, "We are part of an occupation whose aims escape us".

[Kim Lockhart]

Five stars for the poet's talent, legacy, and the quality of the writing . A caveat, however: the mood is dark and the tone is urgent in this collection. We need to brace our reading posture before receiving these messages, before being confronted with our collective reckoning. This isn't a celebration of human exceptionalism; it's an indictment of it.

The poet jumps in immediately, jamming a mirror in front of us, and naming the first attribute we must recognize: we need to admit that we have adopted complacency. What we are (not) facing isn't solely what we have lost; it's that we've lost control over all of it. We tossed the steering wheel out the window some time ago, and yet we are still riding in the back of the car. We can't even pinpoint the moment we began ending. And the last to go? . . . will be memory itself. We certainly want to be remembered, more than anything else. It's much more important to us that we're recognized for having been here, than it is to be here right now.

And what is it that we are doing right now? What are the charges we face?

The poet addresses the anonymity built into every modern mode of destruction, which enables and encourages its own escalation. Indeed, many of the poems are about war, particularly focusing on the devastating effects on children and families.

The thread through the collection is a simple concept: we are all doing all this to ourselves.

Much of the collection also communicates the nebulous beginning of the end, how it's a process without a clear starting point. One of the signposts marking the beginning of the end is our transition into items on someone else's list. We can be checked off, left off, struck-through, and thrown away like trash. 

The poet does not hide her rage. The implication is that we, the listeners, are being shaken violently awake. 

Graham redefines what it means to be alive, every aspect of being fully present, instead of passively observing life as it rushes continuously past us. 

The poet can examine the most ordinary and universal experience, such as looking up at the stars, and point out something about our own arrogance that invades even the moment we tend to think of as humbling: we see all the stars as if they were facing us, and not ever as facing away from us, because we are the stars of our own stories.

We tend to think of history as some long road we journey down, or that carries us along like the river of time, but for most of history, humans weren't even here, and besides, as the poet asserts: history is never experienced equally. It isn't a road we travel; it's a storm. 

There is so much of this world that we view as ordinary, putting ourselves at the pinnacle of all life, because we think and talk and build. Yet ordinary organic structures can stretch and bend light itself, which is eternally impressive.

The poet also makes many references to wind, the power that reveals itself only in its effects, but I am unsure what we are to glean from its symbolic importance. Does it represent change, cleansing, speed, energy, spirit? It might mean all those things and more.

The collection is a little like an elegy for the world, but not really for the world is it? Just for us, then. There's too much anger for this to be our eulogy. No, this is something else, more like a revelation of who we've been, what we've done. We are being weighed and measured.

The most beautiful passages are reserved for non-humanity. I was touched by notions like washing off the mountain in the heart of the sea, just like a psalm. Selah.

What especially resonated with me was the sardonic idea that the end of the world will be covered as a media event. (Imagine trying to "both sides" that day.) All those excitable voices, looking for the angle, shouting "What's the story?" while searching for the best thumbnail and click bait hashtag to use. Finality for them will come when there's nothing left that they can describe. Oddly enough, that is also how the end comes for poets.

[Hetian bias]

the book of our time the
Book of our lives the book
Of holy prophecy

[Laura Passin]

Harrowing and unforgettable.

[Paul Scott]

Jorie Graham turns seventy-six this year. For all anyone knows, she could still be publishing poetry five, ten, or even fifteen years from now, but if Killing Spree turns out to be the final collection in the career that began with Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts in 1980, it will stand as a compelling and honorable conclusion. Not that it lands on a resounding major chord or feels like a victory lap—if anything, it feels more like a defeat lap, painfully mindful of failures and fallings short. Our failure to take care of our one and only planet has mattered in Graham’s poetry for a long while now and matters again in Killing Spree, but alongside climate concerns she also insists we face our failure to protect each other from violence and war (words like “massacre” and “slaughter” turn up frequently). The failures of the baby boom generation to live up to its best hopes get some attention, as do the failures of poetry itself. From its title on, the collection could hardly be more sobering. Even so, hope curls around its edges. It’s among her strongest books.
Like its predecessor, To 2040 (2023), carries the atmosphere of dystopian science fiction, often seeming to be set in a near-future in which some catastrophe has overturned most institutions and social practices as well as natural processes. The book’s opening poem, “The World,” begins, “didn’t change much / at first” (3). Changes occurred, however, then accelerated, “And that was when / the end began” (4). The book’s title phrase occurs several times, including as the title of a poem, but its most arresting instance is in “The Eloquence”: “The killing spree began one day in the suburbs” (68). Littleton? Sandy Hook? A few lines on, “bullets whirred like hummingbirds when there were hummingbirds” (68), and since hummingbirds are still with us, the killing spree must occur in an imagined future, but the book unsettles by continually suggesting that our catastrophic future has already arrived. For instance, the statement “I remember the rule of law” (11) teeters between Orwellian pre-imagining and last week’s op-ed. “The classrooms exploded. The bits of desks lay about / in the dust-filled amnesia” (26) could be dystopian fiction or just news from Ukraine, as could “They burned / the silver icons down / to tiny pools” (33). “Once I watch them drag / the whole cuffed family / out” (33), depending on where one lives, could be local news.
Killing Spree is also like To 2040 in alternating between two forms. The eleven left-justified poems use short lines (very short, compared to Graham’s practice for most of her career) of only a few words, quatrains dropping vertically down the page like a plumb line. Combined with Graham’s penchant for longer, unscrolling sentences, the main effect of the very short lines is of speed and headlong movement, of arriving sooner than you expected—underlining the book’s dystopian message that the future we have been anticipating in dread may already be here. Text-message abbreviations (u, yr, bc, and ampersands) lend these poems an intimacy and vulnerability less evident in the right-justified poems. The eleven right-justified poems have longer lines, feel relatively more discursive than lyrical, and sound more like what longtime Graham readers are used to, but the shunted-to-the-right visual orientation creates the feeling that we are looking at things from a new angle, a previously ignored vantage point. This form is superficially closer to that of Graham’s symphonic poems with their page-wide lines and distinct movements—“The Dream of the Unified Field,” “From the New World,” “Emergency”—but are rougher and faster, as though neither she nor we have time for the slow and stately.
In places, the book’s anxiety that some last opportunity to avert a slow-motion disaster has been missed takes on a generational aspect. Born in 1950, Graham is a boomer, part of a generation that came of age both in the U.S.A. and in Europe with a sense of mission, an aspiration to enlighten and transform the world. As an undergraduate, Graham took part in one of the more spectacular attempts to realize that vision, the student uprisings of Paris in May 1968. Recalling les évènements later in “The Hiding Place,” a poem in Region of Unlikeness (1991), Graham depicted a state of confusion, even the leaders having scarcely an idea of what was happening or what might be achieved; a similar cloud of worthy but futile intentions hovers in “Demonstration” in Killing Spree. “I took off my glasses / & pocketed them” the poem begins, a sensible precaution as the speaker approaches the crowd.
[…] The others
were all already
there. There was

chanting, there were orders, the instructions were
loud. (10)
The year may be 1968, or we may be at a No Kings rally. Whenever this event is happening, the speaker hopes it will be unifying and effective, will “become a river of selves, of dis- / appearing selves, us all / stepping again now into the self-erasing / crowd […]” (11). The chanting intensifies: “it sounds just like / answers but what was / the question” (13). It turns out no one knows, exactly.
[…] I think one sd
it’s a game, it’s a theory, but
just then everything

you’ve read about
for all these years
began. Right then. As if it were planned. As if we were
expected. It has not ceased since. (13)
Whatever the demonstration was aimed at, the Fifth Republic or Donald Trump, was ready and waiting and was not about to abdicate, no matter how intense the chanting. The poem ends:
If you can hear me there,
if this reaches you,
forgive us,
we did not know who we were.
Whether the setting is 1968 or 2025, we hear a generation saying to its children, its grandchildren, and its great-grandchildren: we intuited something was wrong, we tried to do something, but we failed. In “Who,” Graham writes, “that power that / ferocity we had / to reach out—reach out-- / something was done to that” (6).
Since part of the failure is not saying the right words at the right time, implicated in that failure is poetry itself. Opening poem “The World” ends:
[…] the words even
the right words

cannot be un-

furled from breath from
mind oh
memory no cannot be
dug up dug up from

this buried world. (5)
Even for one with Graham’s astonishing command of language, words seem to have lost their power in “You Shall Not Speak”:
[…] I don’t know
if there’s anything left now in
my heart. It is so

dry. I must
scour it with
words. They must bring
moisture

back. As they rise up in me
they almost touch
my fingertips & then
they flee onto this

page, they leave bits of
themselves, right here, this trace, these skins….
Once they rivered everywhere— (42-43)
She has a voice, and feels the imperative “to / sing instead—sing!—and the right / song the surprising one full of / forgiveness good- / natured among the many / shrieks” (53). But in the very next poem she asks, “Who am I kidding” (56). At moments poetry seems capable of making a difference: “I clench my hand around / this pen. / I staunch the current” (64). More often, it fails:
Are you almost done I hear myself say,
but when I throw my words onto the scales
nothing moves. (32)

What feels like the failure of poetry in Killing Spree might be more narrowly described as the failure of a high modernist project belatedly undertaken. Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and the Auden of the 1930s attempted to address the entirety of the cultures in which they lived about the questions of greatest moment for their time, drawing on the more serious intellectual currents then in circulation and working in the more advanced frontiers of their form. Similar ambitions animated many of modernism’s immediate inheritors: Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz—naming Schwartz, however, may suggest how foredoomed such ambitions are. Historically, these or like ambitions lie behind great poems not only of the visionary prophet tradition, like those of Milton, Blake, and Whitman, but also poetic monuments like Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Pope’s Essay on Man, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and Tennyson’s In Memoriam. For the modernists, though, such undertakings faced seemingly impossible odds. Their culture had become too various and incoherent—an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” as Eliot memorably put it in “‘Ulysses’, Order, and Myth” (Kermode Selected 177)—for any poem or poet to address, organize, and interpret the whole of it. The political positions their cultural commitments led them to take seemed suspect (and, in Pound’s case, literally criminal). The project asked too much.
Poets understandably moved away from it. Poets born after 1980, the year Graham’s first book appeared, look less towards the example of the high modernists than towards those of Elizabeth Bishop, Jack Spicer, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery, all of whom certainly had ambitions, but less grandiose, less delusional ones. They were, arguably, more modest, more honest, and clearer-eyed about poetry’s reach and capabilities. The need to address urgent questions remained, but strategies like the poetry of witness, more reportorial than hortatory, seemed more effective than that of the Cantos. Explorations of marginalized identities and communities made the unified, integrated culture Eliot hoped to call into being seem not at all desirable. Poetry that seems to declare, “I am writing to clarify and illuminate where we, as a community and culture, stand right now,” as attempted by Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Auden in his twenties, scarcely seems tenable now. It is hard to think of any living poet apart from Graham who is even trying. Killing Spree often seems like an acknowledgement that the project is not just difficult, but impossible.
Ironically, the acknowledgement of ultimate defeat may itself belong to this particular high modernist tradition. Eliot’s last major poem, Little Gidding, written when the outcome of the Second World War was in doubt, dwells on “a king at nightfall,” on “three men, and more on the scaffold, / And a few who died forgotten / […] / and of one who died blind and quiet” (CPP 143). The warriors and combatants in Yeats’s late poems are badly besieged (“The Black Tower”) or sole survivors (“The Curse of Cromwell”) or finally overcome (“Cuchulain Comforted”); “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” faces the problem of having nothing left to say, and “Man and Echo” wonders whether what he did manage to say did more harm than good. Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen” could not be terser or more final, and Pound’s admission of defeat in Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX – CXVII could not be more explicit:
But the beauty is not the madness
Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere. (Canto CXVI, Cantos [1972] 795-96)
Defeat was perhaps inevitable. Acknowledging defeat, though, is not the same thing as wishing one had never made the attempt. Even Pound, amid his wreckage, “a blown husk that is finished” (“from Canto XCV,” Cantos [1972] 794), seems to feel the effort was worth making. And so with Graham in Killing Spree. She did not win the race. Hypocrisy, cruelty, greed, and exploitation won the race. But she is still on the track, taking her defeat lap, and there is a dry, radiant joy in seeing her take it.
Killing Spree is dark, but even so, there are cracks where the light gets in. Some of the cracks, examined closely, open into surprising vistas. The book’s penultimate poem, “Then,” begins with a moonrise and the speaker’s arm around a sleeping beloved. The speaker wants to “let go / of the world / as it was / once,” and chastises herself for past delusions:
& we thought we were
free, we thought
there was history

in the world—
but it was an
illusion, wasn’t it, it
must have been,

because otherwise how
could it have
disappeared
so suddenly. (75)
The poem ends with the image of surviving wildlife—"all the watchers in their dens”—inhabiting
what were once
the sun-warmed furrows
farmers cut
into the earth

when there were farmers. (76)
Farmers have disappeared along with the hummingbirds in this terrible future. Since farming relies on an enormous reservoir of faith in the future, faith that the labor will be worthwhile, that the plants will survive, that the social structures distributing food will be intact, that there will be people to whom the food will be distributed, the imagined disappearance of farmers is as dire a dystopian detail as any in Killing Spree. A curious counterpoint is struck, though, when the next poem, “Suddenly,” begins by suggesting that farming is still going on:
as if beside me
the solitary horse
neighs in the

neighbor’s distant

field […] (77)
The furrows, the field, and the horse together recall Edward Thomas’s “As the Team’s Head-Brass,” written in 1916, less than a year before Thomas was killed on the Western Front. The poem’s speaker is having an intermittent conversation with a farmer, who pauses for a minute at the end of each furrow he cuts with his horse-drawn plow. The conversation is about the devastations of the war. Had the war not come, the speaker says, they would be living in “[a]nother world”; “‘Aye, and a better,’” the farmer replies, “‘though / If we could see all all might seem good’” (Thomas CP 29). The farmer has some faith in the future; indeed, the very act of plowing affirms that faith. At the beginning of the poem, two lovers are glimpsed slipping into a nearby wood, slipping out again at poem’s end. Their presence, too, suggests ongoing life amid disaster.
Graham re-envisioned and expanded Thomas’s poem in “The Hiddenness of the World,” published in Runaway (2020), developing the idea of the disruption and possible renewal of natural cycles. She winked in the direction of Thomas’s poem, I believe, in “In Reality” in To 2040: “The winning ticket is still in my pocket. / The disappearing lovers are still in my satchel. / I have the stories we needed ready” (46). That the two closing poems of Killing Spree make contact with “As the Team’s Head-Brass” floats just a whiff of hope, as does an even more surprising quotation from Pound on the book’s last page: “what thou lovest well / remains” (80)—a line from the Pisan Cantos, a line about what cannot be lost even in defeat.
And we also have the cicadas. They appeared in “Dawn 2040” in To 2040 and reappear in “Suddenly,” at a crucial juncture:
& the rising & falling silences
of terminal hunger
like the cicadas
revving up again

after having ceased long enough

for us to have forgotten the story

completely, for us to be

surprised again

by their engine (78)
The disappearance of the cicadas, even for long periods, does not mean there are no more cicadas. Similarly, perhaps, some hopes can disappear, some principles can disappear, poetry of the farthest-reaching kind can disappear, but all these things may be underground, biding their time, to reappear when we have forgotten all about them.
Raise yr voice in my voice.
Or raise my voice in yrs.
What remains is

always, only, voice—this, here,
this creature in the bony
enclosure, these cicadas in

the burning trees. (79)

[Lorren]

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.

[cc]

You who do know any longer what song is,
or dream, or memory, or the sound of
stars—look up—don’t blink—here it is now the slit throat of the sky
where the endless beginning
keeps pouring itsef
forth.
— “The Killing Spree”

look
at what you hold
in your arms
for free

as the moon
rises
over the fields
without us,

as it rises in the eyes

of all the watchers
in their dens
on their
branches in the hollows of

what were once
the sun-warmed furrows
farmers cut
into the earth

when there were farmers.
— “Then”

[Tony Sadowski]

Jorie Graham is a recent find for me, but I absolutely love her poetry. I pre-ordered Killing Spree after reading To 2024, a random indie bookstore find. It’s remarkable and intense and beautiful and horrid in the best ways, but never completely bleak, somehow. She’s a treasure and Killing spree didn’t disappoint. I read it twice. It’s challenging, but captivating.

[Maja Lukic]

Terrifying, unsettling, acute, gorgeous.

[Cathie]

Just wow!

[Richard Anderson]

All of Graham’s books are set at the edge of the explicable. This one seems to be mostly about devastation in the end of things as we know them. I find them quite moving.