Partly
New and Selected Poems, 2001–2015
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Rae Armantrout’s poetry comprises one of the most refined and visionary bodies of work written over the last forty years. These potent, compact meditations on our complicated times reveal her observant sensibility, lively intellect, and emotional complexity. This generous volume charts the evolution of Armantrout’s mature, stylistically distinct work. In addition to 25 new poems, there are selections from her books Up To Speed, Next Life, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winning volume Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, and Itself. Including some of her most brilliant pieces, Partly affirms Armantrout’s reputation as one of our sharpest and most innovative writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For the last half century, the Pulitzer Prize winning Armantrout (Itself) has stood as a quiet figurehead of American experimental poetry, and this formidable collection offers a look at her recent progression and her signature, language-centered style. The overview begins with new poems before skipping back to poems from 2004's Up to Speed, moving sequentially from there through her five latest books. Themes of time, the financial crisis, and cancer appear, and the new poems introduce a sense of world-weariness as Armantrout begins to look back: "I may want to lie still/ and think about my choices." Stylistically, the poems are remarkably consistent, showing off well-honed characteristics: short lines, crisp divisions, and a commitment to destabilizing meaning through segmentation. "We've made camp/ in the glitch," she writes, and her poems thrive on that jarring quality, with great gaps between points of reference, images, and connotations. Armantrout often writes as though beginning mid-sentence, leaving the reader to contextualize and construe. "The spray/ of all possible paths," reads a couplet, immediately unsettled by "Define possible." Words beget questions and more words in Armantrout's haphazard world, so her work requires a little patience. But, as she writes, "Like God, I will leave// an arc/ of implication," and it's the implication that she explores a stirring feeling of something illuminating, just out of reach.
