Killing Spree - by Jorie Graham (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A new collection from the Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, whose "great body of work . . . has so much in it, more of life and of the world than that of almost any other poet now writing" (The New York Times).

In a review of her first book, Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts (1980), The New York Times heralded Jorie Graham as a "poet of large ambitions and reckless music." In the fifteen collections that followed, she has sought to remake the lyric's ability to capture our recklessly disintegrating and accelerating daily realities. Now, in perhaps the most unflinching book of her long career, Graham explores how the human spirit, in the face of everything that threatens it, might navigate the rapids of extreme change. In these newly spare poems she enacts, with exquisite formal precision, how we might remain intact under conditions--ecological, political, technological--set to destroy what we've come to know as our world. Can we lose our humanity, these poems ask, Can it be taken from us, Will we surrender it without resistance?

Extraordinary and haunting, Killing Spree reads like a survival manual guiding us deftly through the cataracts of a runaway climate, tipping-point violence, and out-of-control technology, into a terrain where a defiant, powerful imagination (and love) of the world reveals itself. Here is a poet truly at the height of her powers.

Review Quotes

"Remarkable. . . [O]ne of the few books of poetry that register the profound struggle of consciousness in our damaged world -- poems grasping at what we still call 'human experience, ' as its horizon recedes from us." --Sandra Simonds, The New York Times

"The Pulitzer winner's 16th collection is startling, unsettling and timely. These spare, exquisitely precise poems depict a kind of wasteland where hope has been halted, in which a narrator looks back to a lost time. . ." --The Financial Times (best books of 2026)

"It is clear that the poet's sense of her work in the world is to look both inward and outward, in order to help us face and potentially ameliorate the catastrophe toward which our Killing Spree propels us--and that makes Graham's work essential and enriching right now." --Laura Mullen, California Review of Books

"Timely and powerful, this is a masterful addition to Graham's oeuvre." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About the Author

Jorie Graham's poetry has been widely translated and has received numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the International Nonino Prize, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. She lives in Massachusetts and is the Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric Emerita at Harvard University.