BOOK REVIEW

Jorie Graham’s Killing Spree

By N.S. Boone     May 26, 2026




Killing Spree
Jorie Graham
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2026)
96 pp. $27 (hardcover)

The work of art disorients us. Nothing feels quite right. We look askance at the painting, trying to find the way in, the angle. Toggle the switch to get a better connection. Maybe then it will fire up, and we’ll be running again. Maybe we can find solid ground.

It’s like what Morty Seinfeld said about the impressionist painters—that they needed eyeglasses. It’s all a bit fuzzy. But the painter was putting you in that position, giving you that perspective, not making things comfortable or clear.

Killing Spree does that. It sets readers down in a strange place, where it is difficult to find one’s bearings. Graham seems to be challenging us to see the present from the perspective of a particular future, one in which there has been some major disjunctions with the present. Is this science fiction? Not exactly. The closest prose analog I can think of is Nicola Barker’s H(a)ppy. As in that book, we know there has been a break with history. People are somehow governed by a kind of digital stream or feed. People, if we can call them that, are largely digital beings, somehow. But we don’t get a full backstory, nor is the possible world built up with enough detail for us to have our questions answered about whats and hows and whys. The effort in Barker’s book, as in Graham’s experiment, is to feel this new history, feel our way through this possible future back to our present selves. Who are we becoming? Who do we want to become?

“Demonstration” shares the dystopian feel that informs many of the book’s poems.

[. . .] I made

my way to where I was to join
the others. The others
were all already
there. There was

chanting, there were orders, the instructions were
loud.

Some technophobia is sprinkled in: “We’re entering // the network.” As in many sci-fi dystopias, there’s a collectivistic push: “expecting // to become a river of selves, of dis- / appearing selves, us all / stepping again now into the self-erasing / crowd.” In many poems, there is the sense that there is no more capability to feel physical sensation. The speaker remembers having hands, as if she no longer has them, in “Who”: “they have erased my hands I think.” And smell? “We were supposed to recall the smell of Spring. / It was uploaded into us / again and again.” The speaker intensely feels the lack of sensation and the sense of being limited or even caged:


It did something to the latticework of our cages.
As if it all caught fire.
But it’s been a long time. Since we saw real fire.
Even that would be
better. I’d put my hands in it, I’d feel it with my fingers.
Sometimes I don’t know if I have
fingers, there is so little to touch and the power that
ferocity we had
to reach out—reach out—
something was done to that. Something calming was
inserted into the picture.


What has happened to us? What Brave New World was foisted upon us? What year are we in? What devious plan was hatched?

You don’t have to be a technophobe to ask such questions in 2026. What has happened? Are we the same people we have been? What world are we being dropped into? Who’s doing the planning?

For we know that we’ve lost our senses. Our physical senses and otherwise. We do not smell, or touch, and we barely see—without mediation, that is. Without the stream. We know we are changing. Some of us might remember what it was like to feel once, to smell, to run. So that we might even wish to burn our fingers again, just to feel they are there. Are they?

Killing Spree enacts a realization of what we are becoming in this very instant, to see back to ourselves from a set of possible futures that each poem sets forth. It’s not a singular sci-fi narrative but a set of probable postulates.

Over her long career, some of Graham’s most memorable poems have had to do with the tragedy of choice, of breaking the spell of being in order to impose one’s own order on the world. In “Fission,” her oft-anthologized poem from her 1991 collection, she writes, “choice the thing that wrecks the sensuous here the glorious / here—.” Graham has always been attuned to the tragic possibility of any choice, of any act; for as the Greeks would have us know, we cannot foresee consequences. We rip the beauty of the fabric of being to make a way for ourselves, to forge an identity, to be more than we are. But such imposition is not without casualty.

Killing Spree, however, imagines humanity from a different angle. The age of tragedy is over, for the time of our agency is passed. Choice is no longer part of the equation. The fabric may be ripped, but we are not doing the tearing. Our hands have disappeared, so we must learn to speak the language of the idle, the powerless.

By the middle of the volume, one begins to wonder whether the apocalyptic language has as much to do with envisioning the afterlife than an actualized techno-dystopia. What if, for the digital age, the afterlife must be imagined in technological terms? What if we’ve come to the point where the only future we can imagine is dystopian? Is that the Eden we will inherit? In “When the World Ended,” the judgment day is “gorgeous”: “a masterpiece. Something’s apogee. A hegemon, a crystallization— / a gigantic re-beginning. We will all be trans- / formed I heard myself / think.” As in other poems, the speaker seems to be joining others in a crowd, but this time, lined up for some kind of inspection:


[. . .] We were not
to speak. Avoid facial expressions while being
assessed. Do not accidentally
express
yourself. Remember. Stay private. Can you do this?
Analysis of the smile is particularly important. Do not. They try to ensure the
smile threshold is triggered. Do not.
During this same moment knowledge will be
produced. It will mass up in you, quickening, organizing. Do not.
It will feel warm.
It has tracers to detect consternation. Do not.
It maximizes addictiveness. To happiness. I feel it. Do not.
It is scanning your iris.


The judgment’s spiritual elements continue to fade into the language of technological probing until the speaker ends the poem enraptured: “I will be / saturated, here is my open eye for you, I will en- / counter you, I will rub the personal surface, I will skim it. Oh it is / frictionless. I will be yr / user. Connect with me.” And yet, with the suggestion of a spiritual judgment day, one sees there are at least two layers of possibility—spiritual and technological—within the future Graham’s poems inhabit. And why shouldn’t the two be blended?

But as the poems discomfit by prying open a future that seems disturbingly recognizable, there are also poems that imagine the very real plight of the present. The book is titled Killing Spree, after all, and some poems seem to stem from the guilt of knowing the many thousands of deaths that have occurred each day due to the wars continuing to rage and that we are made so unendingly aware of through media. The title of “No One Today” bleeds into the first line:

of my own died. I
did not die. My
love did not. Is intact. I
checked. Beloveds

were not dragged

into the net of
the eye of
the drone, were not dis-
membered into

instant ancestors—

The poem is able to work on two levels—first, from the perspective of a protected Westerner, not subject to the imminent threats of those in, say, Palestine. But the perspective of the poem becomes that of one who has lost much in war’s devastation, and remembers the experience:

[. . .] no one
lay waiting to be buried
under the vast
sound then the unending

weight which imitates
eternity
perfectly—where suddenly
we’re down in

the burning
mounds the slippery
pits—how did our room
disappear—& is that a

cry under there, is that a hand

opening and
shutting—a piece of
skin—is that a
shin is that a

nape showing thru
this dust we cannot reach
into, can’t push
away, this covering

which cannot be
uncovered ever
again. They take away
our hands they

make us lie down. Where

are my things, the
things I loved.

This poem represents the trick Graham pulls off throughout Killing Spree—ethical engagement from multiple angles of vision. In this case, there’s the perspective of the media-weary Westerner and of someone who directly suffers the killings, but the poem can also be made to speak within the sensibility of technological sublimity and at the same time within a more traditional spiritual framework. There are undertones of Dante’s Inferno, with the “slippery / pits” that cannot be escaped and the twisted, distorted figures of victims (“don’t bend that way / you’ll hurt yourself”), which may allude to Dante’s torn and twisted souls.

Like all of Graham’s books, it’s a unique achievement.

Where can it go from here? This is the fourth of Graham’s books that has directly dealt with apocalyptic themes, mainly focusing on technological drivers of rapid change that threaten our basic humanity—beginning with Fast (2017), followed by Runaway (2020), and then To 2040 (2023), and now Killing Spree. Each book has become increasingly obsessed with envisioning a dire end, one somehow absorbed in the digital ether while the scorched Earth burns. What is the way out? It seems Graham, herself, cannot escape from it. It must be she is living it—living it for us, perhaps. Perhaps we live in it too but only at the edges of realization. Can such inhabitation as Graham’s poetry achieves be prophecy, soothsaying, truth-telling? What else can it be? There is nothing else for us. We can’t miss it.

Graham catches it, perhaps most memorably in “Death,” the title of which connects to the first line: “flashed her brights at me.” It is unusual for Graham to use personification or to so unsubtly allegorize. But the poem is a brilliant imaging of Death as a passing vehicle warning of what is to come. The “flash” of Death forces the speaker into self-interrogation—“had I made a mistake, / I knew this place was full of mistakes”—and at the same time a sense of the preciousness of time’s passing and the unique beauty of fading things:


[. . .] am I
speeding—am I accidentally unbandaging
the wound—am I mis-
understanding solitude—is joy a

mistake now

as I snake between the shadows and the untouchable

brightnesses the leaf-emptied forests
cast on my face—


Graham shows us beauty experienced in time’s waste, only to be caught in this dying flash.

​Killing Spree by Jorie Graham

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N.S. BOONE is the author of Understanding Jorie Graham (University of South Carolina Press, 2025) and Biblical Proportions, a collection of poetry (Kelsay Books, 2026). He teaches English at Harding University and preaches for the Magness Church of Christ.