RAE ARMENTROUT
"Transformative and ingenious" work from a highly original and beloved California poet.
With graduate poet Charity Ketz
"Transformative and ingenious" work from a highly original and beloved California poet.
With graduate poet Charity Ketz
Rae Armantrout’s poetry occupies a key position in contemporary traditions of experimental lyricism. Angular and ironic, unsettlingly humorous and precise, her work applies deft pressure to the idioms of everyday interaction, consumer culture, and dream. Armantrout’s poems are motivated by an “activating desire for clarity," and yet it is a clarity that refuses easy certainties or disclosures. Instead, her rigorous lyricism works by way of acute juxtaposition and productive contradictions, creating a thrilling “vertigo effect”** for its readers.
Her most recent book, Next Life (Wesleyan UP), pushes through narrative surfaces to arrive at the unexpected complexities subtending both language and event. Her "truly philosophical poetry" consistently reveals a "force of mind that contests all assumptions" (NYT Book Review).
* Hank Lazer, ** Ron Silliman
Rae
Armantrout has published nine books of poetry,
including: Up to
Speed (Wesleyan 2004),
a finalist for the PEN USA Award in Poetry;
Veil: New and
Selected Poems (2001), also a
finalist for the PEN Center USA Award, and
The
Pretext (2001). In 1998,
Atelos Press published her prose memoir,
True.
She
is a professor in the literature department at the
University of California, San Diego, where she
teaches writing.