This is a generous selection of fifty-five poems, written between 1977 and 2011, by Jorie Graham. She is in the front rank of American poets and the recipient of many prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Jorie Graham was born in Rome in 1950. Her father, Bill Pepper, was the Mediterranean correspondent for Newsweek magazine. Her mother is the sculptor Beverly Pepper. After schooling at a French lycée in Rome, she attended the Sorbonne. In 1968, she began to study film at New York University, and became avidly interested in modern poetry. She received an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, eventually becoming its director. At Harvard University she has succeeded Seamus Heaney as the Boylston Professor of Poetry. There she became a colleague of the critic Helen Vendler, who is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard. Vendler chose the poems for this volume in consultation with the poet, and she has written the introductory essay. Jorie Graham lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Helen Vendler writes in her introduction: “This selection from Graham’s hundreds of poems brings into view her deepest human concerns and her persistent inventiveness in poetic style. The poems have of course changed with Graham herself and with alterations in public concerns. Time—its nature, its flow, and its effect on human consciousness—has been her most acute cause of disquiet: the two words “hurry” and “delay” contend throughout her work. But Graham, in her recent poetry, is not merely the private person of her early books, before world events pressed her to global ecological overviews and arduous transhistorical narratives.” 

The book contains sixteen color relief prints by Julian Lethbridge. The artist was born in 1947 in Sri Lanka but raised mainly in England. He studied at Winchester College and Cambridge University. After graduation he began a career in banking but moved to New York City to draw and paint. His first exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery was in 1989, where he continues to be represented. As described by the artist’s gallery, “Lethbridge's abstraction is cerebral, often based on mathematical or natural principles. Methodically building up his surfaces with pigment, he then incises them with repeated patterns. Early in his career, Lethbridge limited his work to shades of black and white.  More recently he has begun to introduce vibrant colors and more gestural brushwork.” Julian Lethbridge lives in New York City.