A review by benplatt
Fast: Poems by Jorie Graham

4.0

A strong collection of Graham's that really effectively uses her fairly established formal style to evoke disintegration, ruin, and dissolving boundaries, whether ecological, bodily, or technological. The poems on death in particular have a really compelling tension between the speaker wanting to remain frozen in time, to reach back to the moment of life, but Graham's syntax and composition really drive home the relentless, rapid movement of time forward, leaving one frantically grasping at what's left. She gets a bit too deep into her own wordplay at times, drawing associative connections that feel more like purely wordplay for the sake of it, but I liked the collection overall enough that it didn't rub me the wrong way - if you can 't do that in poetry, where can you do it