Hell in a Go Bag

Jorie Graham takes a sparer approach to hell in her newest poetry collection.

By Evangeline Riddiford GrahamAugust 10, 2026

• Poetry

• Environment

A FEW YEARS AGO, the Los Angeles Review of Books published a conversation between the poets Jorie Graham and Forrest Gander about their recent respective poetry collections. When Graham mused on the difference between the contemplative gaze of poetry and that of prose, Gander pointed out that Graham’s poetry illustrates the distinction particularly well: if conventional prose might largely be understood as an efficient radio broadcast, he said, Graham’s poetic transmissions contain a lot of “noise.” Gander elaborated: “By noise, I mean the richness of nonsemantic information: your poems are dramas conducted as artful modulations of tone, inflection, emphasis, accent, phrasing. You slow down the action to micro-increments.”

This metaphor has only become more apt with the recent publication of Graham’s 16th collection, Killing Spree. The static is louder now, almost drowning out a recognizable signal. In much of the book, all that makes it through is a kind of stutter, beginning with the first lines of the book’s opening poem, “The World”:

didn’t change much
at first. At
first it
didn’t change

much, at first I
didn’t—I don’t—
change much.

Within these seven very short lines, the speaker shifts from an individual observing the world as if from the outside (it didn’t change much) to one who conflates their presumably singular experience with all experience (I didn’t change much). We might infer that if the speaker can offer themselves as synecdoche for all living things, the utterance amounts to the world itself interjecting—only, at this threshold of profound unification, to hesitate. After all, who speaks when “the world” declares itself? The planet? Every species? All humans—in disarray or in chorus?

Throughout Killing Spree, the speaker and/or speakers will reiterate versions of this noisy failure to convey what Graham characterized, in her 2020 collection Runaway, as “one lucid unassailable / thought.” Six years later, that prospect seems more out of reach than ever. In this new collection, prevarications turn in on themselves, and any clarity of reasoning is undermined by uncertainty in the very act of the utterance. Sentences simply trail away or scatter into choked fragments. Is this operator error or the result of impossible atmospheric conditions?

In a 2023 interview with Katy Waldman, Graham described real-world political, social, and ecological forces as the “biome” around her poetry, and her subject as the experience of and response to this pressure. Over the course of the last five decades, ecology in particular has drastically and irreversibly degraded. So has Graham’s poetic expression of the attendant psychic reaction. In Killing Spree, our social and political reaction to a climate disaster is static—collective inertia accompanied by the excessive and unhelpful production of noise—and it amounts to an ongoing self-attack.

The facts are clear: we know we need to act, and we know we aren’t doing so (“we” of course being many but not all of us). Fully informed of our options and conscious of our self-destructive and entirely unnecessary paralysis, we find ourselves sustaining what climate scientists Andreas Malm and Wim Carton describe as a societal-level state of “naïve puzzlement”: we know and don’t know what’s wrong—it’s obvious, it’s too big, we’ve in fact had every chance and yet. This informed inaction in the face of disaster has to fray a person’s—a public’s—nerves. Worse: This trap of our own making is actually tightening. As Malm and Carton point out, our political holding pattern is energetically enforced by corporate interests who advocate for public passivity in favor of their short-term profit–motivated “programme for how to deal with the rush into catastrophe: let it continue for the time being, and then we shall sort things out towards the end of this century.” As the titles alone of Graham’s most recent three collections, Killing Spree, To 2040 (2023), and [To] The Last [Be] Human (2022), suggest, the poet is keenly aware that we cannot wait that long.

“We knew these were the last years of water,” Graham writes in “Inflammation,” near the end of Killing Spree: “Anyone could tell.” The next sentence is still more frightening, and familiar: “All you had to do was be alive and you knew how large the end was, how empty of / mercy, you wouldn’t even bother to turn around / to see how close the storm.” Why is it so painful, that cop-out of not even bothering to see the storm? In 1927, psychoanalyst Ernest Jones coined the term “aphanisis” to account for what he observed to be the irreversible death of an individual’s libido—that is, the extinction of their sexual desire but also their drive for constructive activity more generally. The concept has since fallen out of favor, but it’s useful in thinking about Killing Spree, and Graham’s extended account of the fear that one’s psychic capacity to act might have been rendered as extinct as the species of birds and insects that, as the poet mourns, are not coming back.

Jones’s theory of aphanisis has been debunked due to the lack of evidence that a person’s motivation can be permanently and entirely extinguished; part of the tragedy that Killing Spree describes is that we behave as if our ability to act is already extinct when it is not. The self-destructive stuttering of the new book reflects the pain and self-hatred of inaction, because as Graham notes in the poem “Who,” we do at some level know that psychic paralysis might be shaken off—and still we do nothing:

It is possible to stop waiting. It is.
What arrives in the end is not silence—not that hem of the vast
emissary. What arrives is hunger.
So you decide it’s better not to want.
You decide it’s too hard to move.

Of course, the implied universality of “who” (and “we”) should be taken under advisement. As the critic Brandon Kreitler has observed of Graham’s more obviously topical recent work and the conversation around it,

[O]n the other side of the realities the project bravely faces are those it is unprepared to see. Who speaks from these poems but a privileged, post-belief subject stuck in the empire’s gentle senescence, at once wanting and fearing the return of absolute stakes, snared by a narrative both authentic and diversionary?

More interesting, Kreitler suggests, is to understand these poems not simply as political practice and concern but as an artist’s urge to inhabit “history’s crescendo”—and to see past it, to the end of the poem.

In that sense, Killing Spree occupies the space of the Western tradition’s ultimate last stop: not death but damnation. Much like Christina Rossetti’s lovers in the 1865 poem “Amor Mundi,” we—a limited we—have tripped collectively downhill, in light, soft sports shoes, refusing to see the signals from the heavens until we suddenly realize that there is no turning back, no possibility of course correction. For Rossetti, the lovers’ indulgence in privileging their own desires over familial responsibilities or reason has led them down “hell’s own track.”

In the 20th and 21st centuries, hell is, of course, other people: the fright-house mirror of other people’s perceptions of oneself, and the psychological alienation that accompanies this discord. The “scaled and hooded worm” of Rossetti’s imagining is unnecessary—in fact, in “I Watched a Snake” (from her 1983 collection Erosion), Graham explicitly sets aside the belief that the motion of a snake has “something to do // with lust” in order to recognize that “desire // is the honest work of the body, // its engine, its wind.” By contrast, in Graham’s superficially idyllic “Picnic” (from 1991’s Region of Unlikeness), a child narrator observes adults enjoying a party—grass near the water, laughter—and shrinks not so much from their hedonism as from the abyss of their hypocrisy and sorrow: “The mouths of the gods are stuck open really./ They are sated, exhausted, and still they must devour us.”

In the afternoon, the father sleeps with someone else, and the mother reapplies her makeup, forcing her daughter to watch the emergence of a ghoulish, powder-streaked “third / party” in the bathroom mirror. The exhausted daughter hopes that fate—“this thing that is / the predicate”—will soon strike the endless day of dissatisfied seeking. Graham’s lines are taut, yet compared to the psychic landscape of Killing Spree, “Picnic” is a populated hell, with specific interpersonal relationships: Psyche waiting for Eros, and a woman pondering marriage to “the arms merchant named Rudi.”

Today, Graham, who at age 76 considers herself to be writing her “late work,” takes a still sparer approach to hell. She has long put aside allusions to Orpheus, or Herzog, or Paris. In Killing Spree, even the lovers are gone, faded into shadowy figures sans sex drive or any identifying marks. (Hints of domesticity linger in nighttime memories of a mother, a father.) Birds remain, barely. Even the distinctions between “I,” “we,” and “you” are reduced, as Graham’s timorous survivors hide from such psychologically demanding nuances. In “When the World Ended,” the speaker goes so far as to advise a kind of deadening of the self. Even the flicker of a smile is a dangerous trigger:

During this same moment knowledge will be
produced. It will mass up in you, quickening, organizing. Do not.
It will feel warm.
It has tracers to detect consternation. Do not.
It maximizes addictiveness. To happiness. I feel it. Do not.
It is scanning your iris. I beg you do not think. Let the years float. Abandon
memory. I am your friend. I want you to survive. The penetration. The
examination. Estrange. Don’t look, don’t see.

In other words, self-knowledge risks knowledge, and knowledge risks action, and action risks a change to a status quo in which prioritizing one’s own relative safety is to make the meager best of a very bad job. (In Killing Spree, this only gets as proactive as a go bag sitting on a countertop—packed, naturally, with the trappings of affluent captivity: laptop, ID.)

The sensation of being overwhelmed has been a prevailing theme throughout Graham’s career, and critics have pointed to it as part of her inheritance of modernism’s vision of the self upended—both by the incursions of a rapidly changing world and by the machinations of the artistic gaze, in which the poet’s act of looking at her subject disgorges that “third party,” the work. Thus, the modernist poet both critiques and produces modernity (even more of it!). In this same tradition, Graham’s earlier writing met the excesses of the present with still more abundance, developing, as Graham has put it, her signature “massively, destructively long lines”—themselves designed to overwhelm—and a concern in the poet as a slightly suspect agent of proliferation. This plays out most plainly in her leitmotif of the garden as a place of slightly queasy new grafts, as in “Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts,” from Graham’s 1980 collection of the same name. In 1993’s Materialism, the garden remains a place where the “decisions and revisions” of T. S. Eliot’s single minute of modernity are enacted by a pair of hands “making and unmaking promises” in the soil (“The Visible World”). Perhaps the poet’s hands are moving too fast—at her touch, mosses are “deranged” and even the hard clay crumbles. Yet by the final line of “The Visible World,” a seed is planted.

By Runaway, Graham’s garden was still flourishing, but the picture of regeneration, which had pulsed with futurist voraciousness in “The Visible World,” now carried the wistfulness of an encore. Runaway opens just after the action of a rainstorm, when the poet can hear the “washed world, the as-if-inquisitive garden, the as-if-perfect beginning again / of the buds forced open, forced open”:

—you

cannot not unfurl
endlessly, entirely, till it is the yes of blossom, that end
not end—what does that sound sound like
deep in its own time where it roots us out

completed, till it is done. But it is not done.

The cycle of doing and undoing is more exhilarating at the beginning of one’s life and career; it’s more reassuring if one has confidence in nature’s essential implacability. In Graham’s writing, this has been a source of philosophical continuity. In “Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts,” for instance, the poet writes that “only perfection can be kept, not / its perfect instances.” Decades later, the thought reverberates in a satisfying inversion in “All,” from Runaway: “The perfect is not beauty. / Is not a finished thing. Is a making / of itself into more of itself.” The two subtly different claims share a bedrock: always true of the world is its unfinished business, its perpetually incomplete growth.

But the book that followed Runaway marked a deliberate shift in focus. As Graham explained in a Griffin Poetry Prize interview, many of the poems in To 2040 distill that famously abundant lineation into more compact stanzas. Other poems were justified to the right margin, as if, Graham said, she were writing into a wall—or an end stop. This wasn’t verse enacting the madness of relentless abundance but a poet pausing to take stock of the scarcity of time and attention induced by such a culture. (“My interval / is fixed,” Graham wrote, as if shocked into shortness: “Who / fixed it.”) This straitened approach to the formal space afforded (or earned) on the page carries through into Killing Spree; its effect is intensified by even more frugality of detail—and thus of gorgeousness, in all its fleeting perfection. Here, the “white […] silks” of blossoms pattern the ground, but their beauty turns out to be historical, courtesy of Édouard Vuillard’s 1898 painting Repast in a Garden. After our killing spree, we are left not with a real garden, lively with snakes and rain, but its simulacrum: an artwork.

That art-making itself might not merely inhabit, as it did in “The Visible World,” a culture “slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings, / opportunities / taken,” but might actually be propagating the ruinous fantasy of a present and a future in which the patterns of the world continue as before—this is yet another loss. Graham nods to this specific bit of psychological torture with suitably astringent humor in the Killing Spree poem “You Shall Not Speak”:

why do you want to move

into my space,
onto this page, this line, this line which has become
so very long, we have been waiting in it
forever,

& this taste in my mouth

is a new one,
it is my swallowed words,
everything I must not say.

Look at the poet, Graham seems to wince, taking up what precious space and time we have left with a long line that still cannot say what needs to be said.