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Tristan's Reviews > Fast: Poems

Fast by Jorie Graham
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really liked it
bookshelves: poetry

Fast was a dense and unusual book of poems. Not nearly so difficult as some of the experimental verse I've been reading recently, it still was characterized by a kind of obliqueness and formal inventiveness. Many poems shuttled between verse and prose, long lines and short lines; some had arrows in the text (I'm not really sure what to do with that, but it was an interesting move). The poems were about a wide variety of topics, including the state of the environment, what read like a bout of cancer, something that might have had to do with surgery or a radical shift in identity of a loved one, troubled relationships with family and more.
The poems didn't stick terribly strongly for me, but they all felt well-crafted and intriguing, like the very first poem, "Ashes," which begins:
Manacled to a whelm. Asked the plants to give me my small identity. No, the planets.
The arcing runners, their orbit entrails waving, and a worm on a leaf, mold, bells, a
bower--everything transitioning--unfolding--emptying into a bit more life cell by
The poems of Fast were somewhat overwhelming; I'm having trouble picking portions to quote because I feel like I can't encapsulate the experience unless I'm giving you whole poems that often stretch four or five or more pages with long lines and wide pages and dense text--"The Medium" looses something when you don't have all of it, though I can show you the sort of work it is if I tell you that the first line is "Lethe--river of unmindfulness--what am I to forget now--forget sweetheart--and" and the next line is "I wake--and", with the "I" under the "w" in "now", but I'm not going to be able to do this for the entirety of the five-page-long poem.
There was no poem I didn't like, although few I loved. My favorites were "Ashes", "The Medium", "Deep Water Trawling", "Shroud", "We", "From Inside the MRI", and "Cryo". I wish I had purchased this, instead of borrowing it from the library, because it would be really nice to spend more time with this--a book meant to be examined, rather than just read.
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Reading Progress

June 16, 2018 – Started Reading
June 16, 2018 – Shelved
June 18, 2018 – Shelved as: poetry
June 18, 2018 – Finished Reading

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message 1: by Sandra (new) - added it

Sandra Please send me the poem Fast by jorie Graham


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