Description
April 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9965868-3-2
5.5 x 8.5
Trade Paper Original
106 pages
The Rest Is Censored is Graham’s second full-length collection of poems, following Terminal Humming (Edge Books, 2009).
Initially conceiving the project as a daily experiment, Graham gave herself a few rules: she would ride the bus to work every weekday, and—even if the bus were otherwise empty—she would sit next to a stranger, then write about what happened. As she recorded these moments of proximity, cataloging whatever bits of conversation or body language or observation that attracted her attention, another thread gradually emerged—that of the poet in less public moments: speaking to a beloved, to a therapist, to herself.
The Rest Is Censored situates itself among similarly constrained works by Bernadette Mayer, Lyn Hejinian, and others, while Graham’s condensed forms bring to mind the work of Lorine Niedecker. She treats the work as a mindfulness practice, one in which she explores the opposing poetics of connection and reticence.
