SOURCE: Klink, Joanna. “To Feel an Idea.” The Kenyon Review 24, no. 1 (winter 2002): 188-201.

In the following review, Klink offers a detailed examination of several of the poems from Graham's 2001 book, Swarm.

And out of what one sees and hears and out Of what one feels, who could have thought to make So many selves, so many sensuous worlds, As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming With the metaphysical changes that occur, Merely in living as and where we live. 

—Wallace Stevens, “Esthétique du Mal”

In one of Jorie Graham's earliest poems, “The Geese,” from Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts, she writes about “a feeling the body gives the mind / of having missed something” (38). I know this feeling when I read her poems; you may have experienced it. Readers of Graham's work are often moved by her poems even while finding that the language is difficult...