Begin with a Failed Body

Reviews / Votes

Graham's intellectual tentacles are long, and her imagination is generous. She is constantly searching for something to pull into the body, to feed the body. Her verse is terse, marked by technical compaction, and yet it is simultaneously grandly encompassing and voracious in its interests. In her we have a poet acutely sensitive to the ways of the body, its betrayals, its pleasures, and its unknowable selves. She is an exciting new voice, but this claim of 'newness' seems almost trite, as there is nothing 'new'-at least not in the sense we might apply it to a novice's work-about the authority, wisdom, and daring we find in these poems. -- Kwame Dawes Poems that speak both to the richness and ruin of history and teem with all that is earthy and corporeal. -- Julia Bouwsma * Poetry Northwest *