Overlord: Poems

A New York Times Notable Book

“Graham is one of those rare poets who not only has created a language and poetic structure all her own, but who seeks to redefine herself with each new book.”—San Diego Union-Tribune

In her most personal and urgent collection to date, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Jorie Graham explores questions of existence and presence, of being and otherness.

Set on the coastline known as Omaha Beach in Normandy, the poems in Overlord—the code name for the wartime invasion itself—move between visions of that beach during the Allied invasion and that landscape of beaches, fields, and hedgerows as it known as today.

Overlord meditates on our new world, ghosted by, and threatened by, competing descriptions of the past, the future, and what it means to be, as individuals, as a people, "free."

Jorie Graham is the author of fourteen collections of poems. She has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the International Nonino Prize. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard University.