SOURCE: Molesworth, Charles. “Jorie Graham: Living in the World.” Salmagundi, no. 120 (fall 1998): 276-83.

In the following essay, Molesworth explores Graham's poetics and detects both lyric and philosophical strains in her works.

What does it feel like to read a poem by Jorie Graham? What do we need to bring to her poems, and what do they promise in return? The first impression is one of excess, in terms of style and subject matter. As she deploys (and enjoys) a host of rhetorical and stylistic markers, she maneuvers language nearly to the point of mangling it. She looks steadily at the world with a desire rooted in obsessive description, an almost maniacal belief that it is after all almost possible to say what we mean and want to say. She also constantly longs for the transcendent and the ineffable: one poem ends, “What is the void once it is...