Jorie Graham's 'Overlord' and the cosmopolitan lyric

Jorie Graham formulates, in Overlord (2005), lyric poems that work toward recognizing the ethical obligation that cosmopolitanism suggests we all have in relation to all other people. From within the mainstream of contemporary American poetic discourse and the privileged tradition of the Western lyric, Graham rethinks lyric subjectivity in order to offer the first person speaker as a site of absence and alterity that allows the subject to recognize the ways in which otherness and others inform the self. Graham uses this kind of speaker as a voice of documentary witness in the midst of violence, as she draws upon the histories of the D-Day invasion and of contemporary conflicts for several poems, and as a devotional speaker that promotes and practices dis/belief in a post-9/11 world. Overlord shows Graham's most thorough-going effort to date to construct a maximally complex lyrical mode that remains ethically viable in the twenty-first century.