[To] The Last [Be] Human collects four
extraordinary poetry books—Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway—by
Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham.
From the introduction by Robert Macfarlane:
The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at
373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts per
million; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. The
body of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of those
eighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, written
from within the New Climatic Regime (as Bruno Latour names the present), rife
with hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerful
to experience … Graham’s poems are turned to face our planet’s deep-time
future, and t
