"No poet gets caustic, or self-critical, or sarcastic, as well as Armantrout, whose quick stanzas—half Twitter, half Emily Dickinson—say a lot about how language, money, love, and memory can fail us, and in very little space. This collection, in particular, might give readers still on the outside of Armantrout's brilliance a set of new ways in."—Publishers Weekly"Rae Armantrout's poems roll out in gentle bursts. They are short, often funny, but also deeply felt works written in plain, direct language, with unusual line breaks that keep your attention on their singular rhythm and pointed, poignant imagery."—Robert Ham, The Portland Mercury"The technique of construction by which she prefers to give wholeness to poems is to isolate a word, a bit of jargon or cliché, and move it further and further outside of its expected usage. The multiple appearances of this ordinary word run a thread through several discrete episodes. You often don't notice the thread until she pulls it taut, at which point it becomes a spine. . . . This effect is characteristic and unique. It can take any content. It can even take any tone. It can be teasing, curious, threatening, knowing, sarcastic, paranoid, proud, gentle. The feeling it names, however, is consistent. Not ecstatic or epiphanic, but something more like what Archimedes meant when he shouted, Eureka!"—Aaron Kunin, Lana Turner"Armantrout's poems advance through precise, almost Dickinsonian lines, where prolixity is skillfully trimmed down to reveal taut and muscular lines and stanzas: minimal words, maximum weight."—Matthew Gagne, Jacket 2"Armantrout articulates across her career all of the concerns of language poetry: postmodern culture, self-reflexivity, the materiality of language, semiotics and deconstruction, disruption of the symbolic order, and oppositional politics inherent in the interruption of the language of seamless ideological discourse."—Ross Leckie, The Fiddlehead"This is a poetry that values music in the sense of a John Cage and not a Mozart—where themes are not necessarily expected to be developed or recapitulated, where what has come before does not play much of a role in what comes next, where the out-of-sync is given as much space in the composition as the in-sync. I feel as though I could spend many more paragraphs exploring possibilities for the meaning of this one poem, and that's what makes Just Saying a very worthwhile book. Its exploratory poetics will get you exploring too. It's a poetry, primarily, of the mind. Just Saying is a useful book. It sets one thinking. It destroys common patterns of thought, pretensions of knowledge, empties us of our self-importance. It even, at times, places us on the edge of beauty, puts it on our tongues to taste it, then pulls it away before we can savor it. I feel better prepared now, but for what, I just can't say."—N.S. Boone, Southern Humanities Review"She assembles images, thoughts and sensations–things seen, heard, overhead–and finds inconspicuous patterns in them, never losing the abiding sense that saying anything might mean pretending to know too much. Yet many poems lead to overpowering revelations that will be lost on those only committing to a cursory read. Rae Armantrout's full bibliography is important and possibly essential. But it seems to matter that we don't ignore the incredibly high level at which she is currently writing. If there are few variations in style, one might remember that her poems are new like every day is new: as long as the world is changing, there is fodder."—John Deming, Cold Front"Armantrout is on the lookout for the live-wire of the moment, the chatter of the now. She overhears, she jots, she scans. 'See something, say something,' a poem begins. It's Armantrout's credo, her ars poetica. Everything she sees becomes a poem—a suspicious package."—Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune"No poet gets caustic, or self-critical, or sarcastic, as well as Armantrout, whose quick stanzas—half Twitter, half Emily Dickinson—say a lot about how language, money, love, and memory can fail us, and in very little space. This collection, in particular, might give readers still on the outside of Armantrout's brilliance a set of new ways in."—Publishers Weekly"Armantrout explores existential questions with rare economy. Here the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet scrutinizes marketing slogans, corporate catchphrases, and metaphysical quandaries."—Carolyn Alessio, Booklist
Armantrout’s 2010 Pulitzer (for Versed) moved her from avant-garde paragon to a much more widely—and no less deeply—admired station: this second book since then (10th overall) finds her excelling in familiar yet challenging laconic modes, alert to the hypocrisies of daily life, the stresses and fears of adulthood, and the contradictions within our own desires. “I want to explore/ the post-hope zeitgeist,” Armantrout quips, and sometimes she does: in a poem about action movies and politics, “America/ has a lucid dream,” while in a tenderly frightening poem about motherhood, flowers, cold weather and firewood, “Each baby’s soul/ is cute/ in the same way.” Where recent volumes looked at her own life, before and after a diagnosis of cancer, this one more often turns outward into the shared facts of age and death, or at the oddities of our shared culture, with its superhero movies, its silly politics, its “lovely, fanged teenagers,/ red-eyed smeared with blood.” No poet gets caustic, or self-critical, or sarcastic, as well as Armantrout, whose quick stanzas—half Twitter, half Emily Dickinson—say a lot about how language, money, love, and memory can fail us, and in very little space. This collection, in particular, might give readers still on the outside of Armantrout’s brilliance a set of new ways in. (Feb.)
It's surprising how much jagged energy courses through the typically spare, distilled poems in this latest book by Armantrout, a distinguished poet who finally, deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2009's Versed. From violins coursing downward and monomaniacal hummingbirds, to "fire in a cage,/ gnawing on wood" and "bushes/ flowering furiously," to the poet herself "practic[ing] high speed de-/ selection," energy—veering up, gearing down, ever driving us forward—is Armantrout's very subject. That, and the balance we strike as we are buffeted about between beginning and end ("The difference// between nothing/ and nothingness// is existence"). Being "balanced," though, is something achieved only through constant readjustment, redefinition, de-selection (it's also the solid-as-rock, one-word closing line of the poem "Subdivision"). Life darts restlessly about: "This train of thought/ is not a train,// but a tendril,/ blind"; one poem even ends open-endedly with the lines "slim trunks bend/ every which". It's all very refreshing, even, dare one say, energizing. VERDICT Armantrout is sometimes accused of being inscrutable, but these terse, innocent-looking poems deliver scary insight. Highly recommended.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
