FAST Times: Jorie Graham's Life in Verse

Aida Edemariam reads Jorie Graham's newest collection of poetry, FAST, at The Guardian. In her book, Graham gazes at her own mortality, writing around it in relation to current events. In her article, Edemariam guides readers through Graham's path to acclaimed poet: "Now, in FAST, her subject is mortality – her own (she was diagnosed with cancer five years ago), her parents’, that of intellect and culture (in dementia, in digital overwhelm), that of the planet." From there: 

It is a collection of sensual poems so urgent that, by the end, they have abandoned traditional beginnings and are physically bunched up on the right-hand side of the page. And through it all, an unwavering, serious belief in the power of poetry, a repeatedly inhabited rejection of Auden’s assertion that poetry makes nothing happen.

Some of this – whose lines fragment across the page into single words or abrupt phrases that fail to reach across silence, bumping loving endearments up against the idea of atoms, of “infinite smallness / * / which occasions incorruption or immortality” – has earned her, in some quarters, a reputation for difficulty, for writing “unintelligible” poetry “deliberately intended to frustrate the reader”, according to the critic Adam Kirsch. A review in the New York Times of Overlord(2005), entitled “Jorie Graham, Superstar”, called it poetry to soothe “the art form’s nagging status anxiety (anything involving this much Heidegger must be important) … there’s always been something strangely bleary in Graham’s writing – as if she’s just noticed something interesting and motioned the reader over, only to stand in his light, blocking his view with her own viewing.”

Read on at The Guardian.