Fast: Poems

Graham more fully explores the new direction she hinted at in her 2015 selected volume, From the New World: poems that are frantic, syntactically and formally restless, shifting from long-lined stanzas to prose blocks to short, single lines. Those four new poems, including the title poem here, engaged a consciousness at the outer limits of bodily experience. Graham’s 12th collection joins these poems to 19 others in a dizzying, difficult exploration of that border and the world beyond—the one in which the human is becoming or has become unrecognizable: “Each epoch dreams the one to follow.// To dwell is to leave a trace.// I am not what I asked for.” This latest book contains some of Graham’s most accomplished work to date—the poems “Reading to My Father” and “The Medium” among them—but Graham has always been a poet of great books, followed by books that explore new forms and new ways of seeing. This is at its heart a book of exploration, with varied levels of success. Still, there’s a great pleasure in reading one of America’s most intelligent poets work her way through subjects that are by their nature beyond understanding: “the floating faces which carried/ themselves through all the eras—they say nothing,” Graham writes; “there is no real to which you can refer.” (May)