[To] the Last [Be] Human

A Poetry Book Society Special Commendation Autumn 2022.

[To] the Last [Be] Human collects the four remarkable books Jorie Graham has published with Carcanet since 2008, Sea Change, Place, fast and Runaway, a tetralogy in which her signature line and attention to our Anthropocene moment emerge, uniquely, radically, as the songs of our global climate.

In his introduction to this book, Robert Macfarlane writes, ‘The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at 373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts per million; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. The body of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of those eighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, written from within the New Climactic Regime (as Bruno Latour names the present), rife with hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerful to experience.