Likely, you will either understand and connect with Vestige or you will absolutely not. The styles of poetry therein are challenging, in their intellectual interiors. Vestige will be appreciated by those who understand poetry in form and purpose, as well as social-context. Graham studied poetry via an MFA at The New School and that deliberation to know the root and stalk of poetry shows in her writing. I wonder which came first? This manuscript exudes questions, I don’t think it was intentionally meant to provoke questions but it does. Primarily because context is everything, as evidenced in the cento poems where in just one short eight lines, poets Jenny Xie; Jana Prikryl; Elaine Equi; Jana Prikryl; Cynthia Cruz; Lawrence W. Manglitz and Brenda Shaughnessy’s work are referenced.

Completely the opposite of the way I write and others I read write, Vestige demands that the reader is clued-in and paying attention, because this isn’t a botched experiment or surrealist drug-fuge, this is serious and cerebal. If you didn’t make the effort to consider what’s being said inside what isn’t being said, or examine the pared down wordage for greater elucidation, you could take Vestige (which lives up to its name sake rather brilliantly) at face-value and find therein, expansive considerations of what it means to be female or mentally ill or hospitalized and how memory breaks into strange fragments through these experiences.  The publisher noted: “It is written for those whose inner worlds are richer than their external ones.” Which more than anything else, sums Vestige up in its collective parts. Unsurprisingly, Vestige won the Beautiful Pause Prize in 2025 by this publisher who recognized the evocation of an inner world. I can truly say I haven’t read a collection like this, perhaps since Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Gillman) or By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart (1945). Both differ drastically in being less acquainted with poetic devices and the ‘voice’ of Vestige is searingly modern and today, freed then of the restrictions of older writers.

I didn’t find surprises in Vestiges, so much as it pulled deeper understanding out of me through experiencing it. When chapbooks are done right, they are the best medium for poetry because they never give quite enough, leaving you hungry. An amuse bouche in poetics. It fits Graham’s writing which also repeatedly and with taut precision, pulls back before revealing all:

I no longer have a body. His hand

goes to my thigh, but I’ve already disappeared. (Compartmentalization of Steam).

When you study poetry, you’re told this is something that takes decades to learn, the graft of giving not quite enough, a tantalization that mustn’t be self-conscious. Graham hasn’t been alive enough to fit this theory, I suspect it’s innate, like a speech pattern, that befits this style of poetry, born into it, rather than learned, which I appreciate the more, for its authenticity and lack of pretention, like when she says in Penmanship: “I didn’t know what I didn’t know.” A purity if you will, layered without obfuscation, there’s clear intent in the craft but the poems don’t try to be clever, they just are.  

the empty orange bottles

encircle my head & create

a luminous crown (Vestige).

What’s achieved is a tightrope of vignettes, kept deliberately spartan, partially revealed, asking the reader to consider them further. Instead of saying more, less provokes a closer look to the committed. I can imagine others missing the nuance and wondering what they were trying to say. At times I wasn’t sure of my own interpretation but I felt it didn’t matter because Graham doesn’t seem hung-up on precise conclusions, so much as artful considerations.

An unfamiliar bed where consciousness departed like a zephyr (Wrists).

The poem Wrists being such an example, the repeat and emphasis of ‘wrists’ doesn’t speak to suicidality or violence, yet directs through a series of punctuations, the invariable conclusion to the attentive reader. In Bygones, there is a literal annotation, that the poet must “keep one hand on my reflection.” The temptation to give more, is released by the language used to infer without excess detail. While some details must be furnished, it’s acutely edited to ensure nothing extra remains and only the bare gleaming bones of meaning remain, in a puritans stark relief, where; “Every broken promise, now a specimen” (Wildfire Still Burning). In the same poem, Graham talks of these feelings: “Glistening like larvae in the stomach / Of your mind.” The imagery both repellant and deeply observed, again, without requiring hand-holding.

Perhaps Graham’s style is born from the thoughts in her poem Desired, We Would Suffer:

“I hated the world’s complicitous give,

sad and clear in what seemed always a perfect

unfastening. “

In the poem Outpatient, the linearity of sequence is given a little more length, though the subject and the why are ignored, with only title nodding to relevance (of time), in a masterful evocation of the inpatient experience:

My relishing of the minute hand begins at two. I gaze up

at the clock, a holy shrine. See how the beginning closes

in on the ending.

Going on to focus on ‘just one rotation to / complete itself once.” There is scarcety of language without omission of meaning, as each line is so carefully wrought as to be unfolded and mean ten times the length. Again, this is not something you can teach so much as innate language by how you process the world.

In the eponemomous poem Vestige (Buspirone Poem) subtlty allows emotional language a brief visit on stage:

“extrapolation of how much longer can this last but it’s already been

longer than I can endure”

Again, reminding me of those female writers who used code and knowledge to embed greater depths to their work and left messages in the walls for their readership to follow the trail. Sometimes in a title like Graham’s poem Gleeful Rejection of Object Permanence, its referral more telling than the content, with other insights therein:

“How perfect they are. How I’d never want to know them.”

Depicting grief’s selusion and the excess of modernity, in such a considered way, it is both breathtaking and quietly devastating.