Rae Armantrout

The poems in Money Shot are forensic. Just as the money shot in porn is proof of the male orgasm, these poems explore questions of revelation and concealment. What is seen, what is hidden, and how do we know? Money Shot’s investigation of these questions takes on a particular urgency because it occurs in the context of the suddenly revealed market manipulation and subsequent “great recession” of 2008–2009. In these poems, Rae Armantrout searches for new ways to organize information. What can be made manifest? What constitutes proof? Do we “know it when we see it”? Looking at sex, botany, cosmology, and death through the dark lens of “disaster capitalism,” Armantrout finds evidence of betrayal, grounds for rebellion, moments of possibility, and even pleasure, in a time of sudden scarcity and relentless greed. This stunning follow-up to Versed—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award—is a wonderfully stringent exploration of how deeply our experience of everyday life is embedded in capitalism.

Money Shot

Provides an expanded view of the arc of the author's writing, collecting poems dealing with the perversity of human consciousness and the confrontation of the invisible experienced during the author's bout with cancer.

Versed

Rae Armantrout has always taken pleasure in uncertainties and conundrums, the tricky nuances of language and feeling. In Conjure that pleasure is matched by dread; fascination meets fear as the poet considers the emergence of new life (twin granddaughters) into an increasingly toxic world: the Amazon smolders, children are caged or die crossing rivers and oceans, and weddings make convenient targets for drone strikes. These poems explore the restless border between self and non-self and ask us to look with new eyes at what we're doing. CARE Dress like you care! Eat like you care! Care like you care! You don't think apples just grow on trees, do you? * A fish taps a clam against a bony knob of coral to crack its shell – which demonstrates intelligence yes, but is the fish pleased with itself? * Alone in your crib, you form syllables. Are you happy when one is like another? Add yourself to yourself. Now you have someone

Conjure

Lyn Hejinian

Ronald Silliman

Others

Steve Benson

Barret Watten

Poetry. Cultural Writing. Memoir. THE GRAND PIANO 3 continues the experiment in collective autobiography begun over email by ten poets identified with Language poetry, who sought to reconnect their writing practicesand to "recall and contextualize events from the period of the late 1970s." When completed, THE GRAND PIANO will comprise ten parts, in each of which the ten authors appear in a different sequence, often responding to prompts and problems arising in the series. In this issue, the order is Steve Benson, Tom Mandel, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Ted Pearson, Kit Robinson, and Ron Silliman.

The Grand Piano: Part 3

Barrett Watten

Ron Silliman

THE GRAND PIANO is an ongoing experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language poetry in San Francisco. It takes its name from a coffeehouse at 1607 Haight Street, where from 1976-79 the authors took part in a reading and performance series. The writing project, begun in 1998, was undertaken as an online collaboration, first via an interactive web site and later through a listserv. When completed, THE GRAND PIANO will comprise ten parts, in which each of the ten authors will appear in a different sequence. These poets are Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Ted Pearson.

The Grand Piano: Part 6

An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980

The Grand Piano

Part 10 Alphabet

Veil contains poems from five of Armantrout's previous books as well as a generous selection of new poems. New readers of her work will be captivated by her poems' immediate availability and freshness.

New and Selected Poems

Veil

Poems written on the shifting ground of imminent systemic collapse

Wobble

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.

Itself

Corrosive new poems from a poet whose work challenges expectations.

Up to Speed

What will we call the last generation before the looming end times? With Finalists Rae Armantrout suggests one option. Brilliant and irascible, playful and intense, Armantrout nails the current moment's debris fields and super computers, its sizzling malaise and confusion, with an exemplary immensity of heart and a boundless capacity for humor. The poems in this book find (and create) beauty in midst of the ongoing crisis. CONTRAST What's to like if not contrast? Shadows beneath the model's sharp cheekbones, her ample yet precise lips. Clean lines separating bounty from its opposite. This is not what I want to want. These eyes on the hypothetical distance.

Finalists

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Rae Armantrout is at once a most intimate and coolly calculating poet. If anyone could produce a hybrid of Charlie Chaplin’s playful “Little Tramp” and Charlize Theron’s fierce “Imperator Furiosa,” it would be Armantrout. Her language is unexpected yet exact, playing off the collective sense that the shifting ground of daily reality may be a warning of imminent systemic collapse. While there are glimmers here of what remains of “the natural world,” the poet confesses the human failings, personal and societal, that have led to its devastation. No one’s senses are more acutely attuned than Armantrout’s, which makes her an exceptional observer and reporter of our faults. She leaves us wondering if the American Dream may be a nightmare from which we can’t awaken. Sometimes funny, sometimes alarming, the poems in Wobble play peek-a-boo with doom.

Cultural Writing. Literary Criticism. Essays. These wide-ranging talks, essays, and interviews-beginning with "Why Don't Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?" and including "Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity," "Poetic Silence," and "Cosmology and Me"--are essential documents for understanding not only Rae Armantrout's poetry and poetics but her contribution to the development of language poetry in particular and contemporary poetry in general. Like her poetry, Armantrout's prose is marked by concision, a refreshing absence of jargon, and a quizzical mind that never rests easy. COLLECTED PROSE also features True, Armantrout's illuminating autobiography, which details her early years in San Diego and Berkeley.

Rae Armantrout

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