Andrew Osborn Reviews Jorie Graham's Fast

Andrew Osborn reviews Jorie Graham's twelfth book, Fast (HarperCollins, 2017), for Chicago Review 62.1/2/3. "As she signaled with the Nietzschean title of her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), Graham is an earthbound perspectivist who seeks to know this world by passionately probing it from as many points of view, armed with as many measures and analytical means as she can devise," writes Osborn. More:

In Fast’s “Self Portrait at Three Degrees,” whose title almost certainly refers to the average Kelvin-scale temperature of outer space, she asserts, “I want to touch things till they break → that / is how to see them → all the points of contact → entropy, diminishment, pressing / and then pulling back and looking, leaving alone → unimaginable → a meaning in / every step.” Before ostensibly conversing by phone with her father’s afterlife in “The Medium,” she mediates the Charles River’s “channeling scribbling erasing / itself while all along chattering self-wounding self-dividing, slowing at bank, at / streamline, at meander, then quick now trying-out scribbling again—why not—one must / keep trying / to make / the unsaid said.” (Why not, indeed. Fast is full of unmarked, uninflected questions as she lets description catch in the eddies of its objects.) Graham is less keen to share the particulars of a parent’s or her own personality than to explore how personality may arise from inert form, flout entropy, and persist after inspiration abates.

The four-part collection’s short opening poem, “Ashes,” retains the spine-and-rib lineation of much of Graham’s twenty-first-century work. But the form and syntax of the second poem, “Honeycomb”—with its variously line-spaced, wide verse paragraphs and phrasing that modulates between periods, dashes, and vectors—is new. One of two “bot” poems, it sets the book’s tone of flattened affects before Graham peoples parts II, III, and IV with the posthumous and otherwise “post human.” Having introduced “Honeycomb” as an “Ode to Prism”—that is, PRISM, one of the NSA programs that Edward Snowden made public in 2013—the poet speaks to and for the algorithmic agents that she presumes are tracking her...