Cathy Wagner
“If you missed any of the collections from Rae Armantrout’s prolific second period, which spans illness, the financial crash, and a fervent and witty engagement with science, this book’s a gift to you: a fat batch of poems, selected and new. In the brave and brilliant new poems, Armantrout slyly questions her own life’s work in poetry, her “40 years/of turning experience into topiary.” But this “topiary” will stand. Armantrout’s poems are funny, politically sharp, feminist, anecdotal, and wise. You’ll read them in a sitting (she’s terse) and for the rest of your life. Armantrout tries to feel the edges of what can be said, saying it one way, then another, to see whether it is the same it, to never quite catch it "just saying" itself. What would we do without Rae Armantrout, who slants the said so we see how we don’t know?”
Peter Middleton
“Rae Armantrout finds extraordinary poetry in the ways we make sense of the world. She tracks the insights, struggles and false steps by which reasoning connects what we see with our own eyes to the images that tumble from films, television and the internet. Her exploration of the ecology of ideas has also made her one of our finest poets of science. What on earth are these golden new ideas of quantum computing or dark matter that the physicists are talking about? Armantrout insists on biting the gold, and introduces even the most cosmological ideas to her own neighborhood. She discovers that the two cultures of science and the arts can touch down on the same sites of contemporary life.”
Lydia Davis
“Hoopskirts, star jasmine, synchronized swimming, Russian icons, a ceramic fish face, electrons and photons: in these poems, everything is interconnected, thought through, deeply felt and expressed in the most precise and necessary words. Rae Armantrout is one of our most inventive and magnetic poets, and she never disappoints: with inspired patience, she embraces the strangeness of our familiar world and refashions it into something new and utterly transporting.”
From the Publisher
"Hoopskirts, star jasmine, synchronized swimming, Russian icons, a ceramic fish face, electrons and photons: in these poems, everything is interconnected, thought through, deeply felt and expressed in the most precise and necessary words. Rae Armantrout is one of our most inventive and magnetic poets, and she never disappoints: with inspired patience, she embraces the strangeness of our familiar world and refashions it into something new and utterly transporting."—Lydia Davis, author of Can't and Won't
"If you missed any of the collections from Rae Armantrout's prolific second period, which spans illness, the financial crash, and a fervent and witty engagement with science, this book's a gift to you: a fat batch of poems, selected and new. In the brave and brilliant new poems, Armantrout slyly questions her own life's work in poetry, her 40 years/of turning experience into topiary." But this topiary" will stand. Armantrout's poems are funny, politically sharp, feminist, anecdotal, and wise. You'll read them in a sitting (she's terse) and for the rest of your life. Armantrout tries to feel the edges of what can be said, saying it one way, then another, to see whether it is the same it, to never quite catch it just saying itself. What would we do without Rae Armantrout, who slants the said so we see how we don't know?""—Cathy Wagner, author of Nervous Device
"Rae Armantrout finds extraordinary poetry in the ways we make sense of the world. She tracks the insights, struggles and false steps by which reasoning connects what we see with our own eyes to the images that tumble from films, television and the internet. Her exploration of the ecology of ideas has also made her one of our finest poets of science. What on earth are these golden new ideas of quantum computing or dark matter that the physicists are talking about? Armantrout insists on biting the gold, and introduces even the most cosmological ideas to her own neighborhood. She discovers that the two cultures of science and the arts can touch down on the same sites of contemporary life.""—Peter Middleton, author of Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After
"Hoopskirts, star jasmine, synchronized swimming, Russian icons, a ceramic fish face, electrons and photons: in these poems, everything is interconnected, thought through, deeply felt and expressed in the most precise and necessary words. Rae Armantrout is one of our most inventive and magnetic poets, and she never disappoints: with inspired patience, she embraces the strangeness of our familiar world and refashions it into something new and utterly transporting."—Lydia Davis, author of Can't and Won't
Daniel Handler
“You know when you look at a word until it means nothing and then, suddenly and at last, everything? The word is poetry. The poet is Rae Armantrout.”
