Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry - Paperback

by Thomas Gardner (Editor)

Jorie Graham is one of the most important American poets now writing. This first book-length study brings together thirteen previously published essays and review essays by many of the major critics currently interested in her work and five new essays commissioned for this volume. Commenting on each of Graham's eight poetry collections, these essays encompass the range of critical thought that her work has attracted, both surveying it broadly and engaging closely with individual poems.
These essays identify three broad concerns that run through each of her strikingly different volumes of poems: the movement of the mind in action, the role of the body in experiencing the world, and the pressures of material conditions on mind and body alike. Gardner both shows how Graham is being read at the moment and charts new areas of investigation likely to dominate thinking about her over the next decade. This collection is sure to become the crucial first step for all future work on Graham and on American poetry of the last two decades.

Author Biography

Thomas Gardner is professor of English at Virginia Tech and author of Discovering Ourselves in Whitman: The Contemporary American Long Poem and Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary Poetry. He has edited three special issues of Contemporary Literature on American poetry of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.