Graham's 1995 collection The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 includes poems from her five previous volumes of poetry, including Erosion and Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts. This collection received the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

The Best American Poetry 1990, edited by Graham and David Lehman, was published in 1991. Graham penned the introduction, in which she elaborates on her ideas of what makes good poetry.

John Ashbery writes many of the blurbs for Graham's books, and she for his. Like Graham, Ashbery has been influenced by many nineteenthand early twentieth-century French poets. His comic novel A Nest of Ninnies, co-written with poet James Schuyler, was published in 1976.

Graham derived the title of Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's characterization of human beings in his treatise Thus Spake Zarathustra. Walter Kaufmann's 1995 Modern Library translation of...