Pulitzer prize winner Jorie Graham’s Collected Poems is here and it’s absolutely monumental! [To] The Last [Be] Human gathers Jorie Graham’s last four extraordinary collections into one utterly exhilarating, hurtling and protesting, collected message to our dying species, our beleaguered planet. A love letter and a warning in our anthropocene age. A prophecy of climate catastrophe and a plea for humanity. Let’s hope they’re listening!
As Robert Macfarlane claims in the introduction, it's "an extraordinary lyric record of eighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, rife with hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse and hugely powerful to experience. Graham's poems are turned to face our planet's deep-time future, and their shadows are cast by the long light of the will-have-been. Their tasks are of record as well as warning: to preserve what it has felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when "the future / takes shape / too quickly", when we are entering "a time / beyond belief". These poems sing within themselves, across the collections. Sometimes ragged, hurting and hurtling; other times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping gift of the given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a "whirling robe humming with firstness".
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