This essay focuses on the poetic practice of Jorie Graham's later work, reading it through the lens of postcolonial theory. Specifically, the essay aims to explore Graham's lyric interrogations of the imagination's restless will to mastery and struggle for form, the taproots of modernist aesthetics, Western epistemology, and imperialism alike. Through an analysis of “Imperialism,” the final poem in wherein Graham both embraces and resists the colonizing force of naming and knowing, the essay explicates decentering, dialogic and revelatory features of her performative poetics.
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Mary S. Strine (2005) studied this question.
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