A New York Times Notable Book

Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham returns with great clarity and passion to her lyrical roots—and builds a rich musical meditation on desire.

In these poems, Graham approaches a host of characters, each of them an embodiment of sexual, emotional, political, or spiritual desire—desire searching for its place in an age of betrayed values, an age when dreaming has been rubbed thin by reason, frayed by the speed of facts. 

Here error is explored as an heroic form of finding one’s way—a wandering toward truth, a pilgrimage guided by the body’s strictest longing, here lovers stay alive in sexually-charged encounters; here, too, angels are overheard muttering warnings. Here are Pascal and his wager, Akhmatova and her refusal, and a few soldiers sleeping before a sepulcher while something incomprehensible happens behind their backs.

Provocative in its spirited merging of the sacred and the skeptical, the celestial and the earthly, The Errancy confirms Graham as “one of our best, most important” poets (Library Journal) and “one of the best, and most intelligent, poets in the language” (Times Literary Supplement). 

Poems exploring the theme of sexual, emotional, political, and spiritual desire through the eyes of a poet's characters examine the age in which we live, where dreams are not as easy as they once were.