Begin with a Failed Body

NATALIE GRAHAM is an associate professor of African American studies at California State University, Fullerton.

Graham’s intellectual tentacles are long, and her imagination is generous. She is constantly searching for something to pull into the body, to feed the body. Her verse is terse, marked by technical compaction, and yet it is simultaneously grandly encompassing and voracious in its interests. In her we have a poet acutely sensitive to the ways of the body, its betrayals, its pleasures, and its unknowable selves. She is an exciting new voice, but this claim of ‘newness’ seems almost trite, as there is nothing ‘new’—at least not in the sense we might apply it to a novice’s work—about the authority, wisdom, and daring we find in these poems.