First Loves: Jorie Graham

Thinking about early and lifelong literary love

I was seventeen and lounging on a friend’s bed when she handed me an open book.

“Read this,” she must have said, though I can’t remember.

What followed was an experience. Reader, you no doubt know what I mean: that moment when the text lifts you clean out of the present. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry…