Fast Commute

Finalist for the 2023 Trillium Book Award for Poetry

“[A]n urgent lament for all we are losing. [Fast Commute] is both an attempt to speak with clarity to the unspeakable, and a realistic look at what settler life is continuing to wreak upon our world. It is a collection of poetry that deeply engages the reader in a vital exploration of the destruction of the environment, while at the same time forging startling new language to honor the very landscape under threat. ”
—2023 Trillium Award Jury Citation

“Fast Commute is an inventory, a checklist of damages. The book describes the honest face of our culture’s ‘myth of unlimited growth’ and catalogues the scars and desecrations all around us—from strip malls to oil refineries (with their ‘manufactured cloud formations’) to residential schools. Yet in the middle of these lists and all this damage are glimpses of something real, even sacred.’”
—Alberta Views

“The incantatory verses in Fast Commute cast a circle of heightened attention, in which it is safe to confront all that we avoid in our distracted lives. It is made of scenes and fragments that at first throb with alienation and grief for all we have done to harm the more-than-human world, until the steady accretion of images and language conjures a spell calling us to right relationship and protecting us from the acedia that comes with living in colonized landscapes. Those who are comfortable in the world, will be disturbed by these verses; those already disturbed will take comfort in them.”
—Trevor Herriot, author of Islands of Grass

“Graham has set herself a vital moral task: actually to see the fantastic violence of resourcist culture, its appalling and unremitting abuse of the land, and to name the cultural forces that render that vast degradation almost invisible, reduce it to a blur on the edge of our fast commute. She has produced a work of unflinching, articulate witness. A keening, at once precise and profound.”
—Jan Zwicky