Beginning with a poem dated June 5th, placed on Omaha Beach, in Normandy—the anniversary of the day before the "historical" events of June 6th—Place is made up of meditations written in a uneasy lull before an unknowable, potentially drastic change—meditations which enact and explore the role of the human in and on nature. In these poems, time lived is felt to be both incipient, and already posthumous. This is not the same as preparing for a death. It is preparing for a life we know we, and our offspring, shall have no choice but to live. How does one think ethically as well as emotionally in such a predicament? How does one think of one's child—of having brought a person into this condition? How does love continue, and how is it supposed to be transmitted? Does the nature of love change?

Both formally and thematically poems of ec(h)o-location in space/time, Graham's new poems work to discern "aftermath" from "future"—as the two margins of the form ask us to feel the vertiginous "double" position in which we find ourselves, constantly looking back just as we are forced to try to see ahead.

In an era where distrust of human experience and its attendant accountability are pervasive Place calls us, in poems of unusual force and beauty, to re-inhabit and make full use of—and even rejoice in—a more responsive and responsible place of the human in the world.