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    Itself
    Itself
    Itself
    Ebook143 pages26 minutes

    Itself

    By Rae Armantrout

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    About this ebook

    What do "self" and "it" have in common? In Rae Armantrout's new poems, there is no inert substance. Self and it (word and particle) are ritual and rigmarole, song-and-dance and long distance call into whatever dark matter might exist. How could a self not be selfish? Armantrout accesses the strangeness of everyday occurrence with wit, sensuality, and an eye alert to underlying trauma, as in the poem "Price Points" where a man conducts an imaginary orchestra but "gets no points for originality." In their investigations of the cosmically mundane, Armantrout's poems use an extraordinary microscopic lens—even when she's glancing backwards from the outer reaches of space. An online reader's companion is available at http://raearmantrout.site.wesleyan.edu.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateFeb 25, 2015
    ISBN9780819574688
    Itself
    Author

    Rae Armantrout

    RAE ARMANTROUTt has fifteen previous books including Versed, which received a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Finalists, Conjure, Wobble (finalist for a National Book Award), Partly: New and Selected Poems, Itself, Just Saying, and Money Shot. Armantrout is Professor Emerita of Writing at the University of California at San Diego. She has been published in many anthologies, including, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and Scribner's Best American Poetry, and in such magazines as, Harpers, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Scientific American, Chicago Review, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

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    • 4/5
      I am inclined to say that I enjoyed this work even more than Versed, the collection for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and the only other book of hers I have read. She moves somewhat further from the obtuse aims of language poetry into more accessible emotional/intellectual terrain here, but her roots remain, though I think a balance has been struck (to some degree) that is advantageous for readers who don't quite "get" language poetry. Armantrout is a skilled poet, and if don't believe that, ask yourself who else could make Flo from Progressive Insurance into a weighty poetic subject.
    • 4/5
      I accept that there's no objectivity in this review whatsoever. I like poems that are smart, that I can think about, and that actually give me something to think about--and that aren't simply reports of some asshat's emotions at time x and place y. Voila. Armantrout does it.

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    Itself - Rae Armantrout

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