SOURCE: Longenbach, James. “Jorie Graham's Big Hunger.” Denver Quarterly 31, no. 3 (winter 1997): 97-118.

In the following essay, Longenbach provides an in-depth examination of Graham's first four books of poems, exploring the relationship between language and sensation in these works.

Jorie Graham published her first book only fifteen years ago, but she has already produced a body of writing that feels like the accumulation of a lifetime. There is not a great deal of work—only four books. But like Yeats, who early in his career cautioned suspicious readers that “it is myself that I remake,” Graham has been driven to turn against her own best discoveries, risking everything that she has achieved. Each of her books is a new beginning; in her most recent and best book, Materialism, each poem feels like an interrogation of the one preceding it. Graham has been unwilling to settle for anything settled, and...