Runaway

New Poems

By: Jorie Graham

Narrated by: Jorie Graham

An NPR Best Book of the Year

A collection of poetry from one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham

In her formidable and clairvoyant collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not?

Keeping pace with the desperate runaway of climate change, social disruption, our new mass migrations, she struggles to reimagine a habitable present—a now—in which we might endure, wary, undaunted, ever-inventive, “counting silently towards infinity.” Graham’s essential voice guides us fluently “as we pass here now into the next-on world,” what future we have surging powerfully through these pages, where the poet implores us “to the last be human.”

Graham reading Graham!

Jorie Graham has few equals on the contemporary poetry scene. I stumbled onto her poem "Scirocco" by accident on the Internet. I listened several times, immediately realizing that she is a brilliant reader of her own poetry. This should not be taken for granted. I could name a multitude of poets who cannot read their own great verse. I would rather hear anyone read T.S. Eliot than T.S. Eliot. Jorie Graham is the exception and this audible book is worth buying for many reasons, but especially because she knows how to perform her own poems.