It is rare to find in one collection an entire skyline burning and the quiet to follow a single worm, to hear soil breathe — in Jorie Graham's fifteenth poetry collection, you do. Jorie Graham's fifteenth poetry collection, To 2040 , opens in question punctuated as fact: “Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map." In these visionary new poems, Graham is part historian, part cartographer as she plots an apocalyptic world where rain must be translated, silence sings louder than speech, and wired birds parrot recordings of their extinct ancestors. In one poem, the speaker is warned by a clairvoyant “the American experiment will end in 2030." Graham shows us our potentially inevitable future soundtracked by sirens among industrial ruins, contemplating the loss of those who inhabited and named them. In sparse lines that move with cinematic precision, these poems pan from overhead views of reshaped shorelines to close-ups of a worm burrowing through earth. Here, we linger, climate crisis on hold, as Graham asks us to sit silently, to hear soil breathe. An urgent open letter to the future, with a habit of looking back, To 2040 is narrated by a speaker who reflects on her own mortality—in the glass window of a radiotherapy room, in the first “claw full of hair" placed gently on a green shower ledge. In poems that look to 2040 as both future and event-horizon, we leave the collection warned, infinitely wiser, and yet more attentively on edge. “Inhale. / Are you still there / the sun says to me." And, from the title poem, “what was yr message, what were u meant to / pass on?" Praise for To 2040 “A Jorie Graham poem is a deep burrow into a position from which one can gather nothing but the sense of being terribly alive. It is a nakedness from which story will not appear to save you. There are many writers with righteous self-assurance, and many comfortable with bewilderment, and they are only rarely the same people. It is Graham's unearthly self-possession in the presence of mystery that renders her poetry so strange."— Kerry Howley, New York Magazine “With a characteristically unflinching eye and formally innovative approach, Graham contemplates extinction and the apocalyptic circumstances of the climate catastrophe. These poems inventively and hauntingly conjure future landscapes, sights, and sounds, offering a gripping and urgent reminder of the future that might await humanity if more isn't done to change course."— Publishers Weekly , Best Books of 2023 “A fluent yet spare volume about grief, loss, and vulnerability, through an array of themes including environmental disaster and personal mortality."— Pulitzer Prize Finalist Citation “An urgent, vivacious book based in stark reality but written with craft and beauty."— Financial Times , Best Books of 2023 “In the face of a global climate crisis, can you delay the inevitable? Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham's new collection is both a call to action and an existential glance at the potential fate of the world."— Electric Lit , Best Poetry of 2023 “'How do I/ find sufficient// ignorance. How do I// not summarize/ anything,' Graham writes in the first pages of her coruscating new work, then proceeds to show readers how to look with pitiless honesty at a damaged world, now and in the future, as even rocks burn, winds stir, and the end nears. A wondrously unsettling read."— Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal , Best Poetry of 2023 “Most notable of the many collections rooted in ecology . . . driven by a skittish yet visionary energy that makes an apocalyptic future feel cinematically thrilling, frightening and all too plausible."— Guardian , Best Poetry of 2023 “Pulitzer Prize winner Graham's 15th collection is perhaps her finest and most profound work yet, revealing such astonishing individuality in the idiosyncratic, elliptical style she has perfected over more than 40 years that fellow poets may feel tempted to throw up their hands in despair. This is a poetry of passionate intensity and conviction that reverberates with an astonishing and almost spiritual transcendence. . . . Since the death of A.R. Ammons, no U.S. poet has demanded so much of her reader or offered so rich and mysterious a reward. Here we are reminded not of Eliot or Yeats but of Habakkuk, Hosea, and especially that voice from the end of Job that cries out, 'Gird up your loins man, and I will question you….' VERDICT A masterpiece that belongs in every library where poetry is found."— Library Journal , STARRED REVIEW “This is a rare gift: an ardent and pitiless anthem to a crazed, razed world."— Publishers Weekly , STARRED REVIEW “Her latest collection, To 2040 , is the culmination of a long career exploring humanity and the environment. Amid much despair, there is hope, too."— Carol Muske-Dukes, Washington Post “One of her best books yet. . . . Graham reinvents Wallace Stevens's legacy of radiant philosophical verse as she seeks to discover how thought and language might throw off their