Rae Armantrout


Rae Armantrout
* Books of her Poetry (alphabetical). * Books of her Prose (alphabetical). * Time Line.

Rae Armantrout featured in:

* Best American Poetry: 2014 (guest editor Terrance Hayes) with "Control" (in two asterix-separated groups of fragments). She commented:


* Best American Poetry: 2012 (guest editor Mark Doty) with "Accounts" (in three asterix-separated groups of fragments). She commented:


* Best American Poetry: 2011 (guest editor Kevin Young) with "Soft Money". She commented:


* Best American Poetry: 2008 (guest editor Charles Wright) with "Framing". She commented:


* Best American Poetry: 2007 (guest editor Heather McHugh) with "Scumble", a single small section of questions and fragments. She commented:


* Best American Poetry: 2004 (guest editor Lyn Hejinian) with "Almost" (in two numbered groups of fragments). She commented that the poem is:


* Best American Poetry: 2002 (guest editor Robert Creeley) with "Up to Speed" (in five asterix-separated groups of fragments). She commented that the poem:


* Best American Poetry: 2001 (guest editor Robert Hass) with "The Plan" (in three asterix-separated groups of fragments). She commented that it:

Books of Poetry (alphabetical).





21 poems from Itself are included in Partly: new and selected poems, 2001-2015.









Buy 'Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2015' by Rae Armantrout

Includes:






Buy 'Versed' by Rae Armantrout

Here, as with many of her other poems, it takes effort to untangle the topic unless the poet gives you more of a hint than is in the work. Her comments in Best American Poetry annuals are helpful to nudge open a door on some of her process and intentions.

The inner book cover includes:

Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. Versed brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writing. The poems in the first section, 'Versed', play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks: 'Metaphor forms / a crust / beneath which / the crevasse / of each experience.' 'Dark Matter', the second section, alludes to more than the unseen substance thought to make up the majority of the mass in the universe. The invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as Armantrout's experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking. Together the poems of Versed part us from our assumptions about reality, revealing the gaps and fissures in our emotional and linguistic constructs, showing us ourselves where we are most exposed.

The lines are usually short (one to five words) and the stanzas also are short (mainly one to three lines). The book is in two halves, its title poem being the second in its half:

Number of poems 43 44
Number of poem pages 62 67
Poems with 1-to-3 lines per stanza 32 34
Poems with 2 numbered sections 8 12
Poems with 3 numbered sections 3 4
Poems with 4 numbered sections 2 1
Poems with 2 asterisk-separated sections 2 7
Poems with 3 asterisk-separated sections 12 8
Poems with 4 asterisk-separated sections 5 1
Poems with 5 asterisk-separated sections 2 1
Poems with 6 asterisk-separated sections 1 0
Poems with 8 asterisk-separated sections 1 0
Poems with extra spaces denoting sections 2 0
Poems with titled sections 0 1
Poems in a single section 5 7
Includes a prose poem 7 4
Part is double-spaced (or a sequence of 1-line stanzas) 4 6
No period at close of poem 27 12
Number of poems 43 44


Books of Prose (alphabetical)

Time Line.

1947.
Born.

1969.
Poetry: Poems.

1978.
Poetry: Extremities.

1979.
Poetry: The Invention of Hunger.

early 1980's.
Poetry: Began teaching writing at UC San Diego.

1985.
Poetry: Precedence.

1991.
Poetry (translated into French): Couverture.
Poetry: Necromance.

1995.
Poetry: Made To Seem. Aphoristic Wit.

1998.
Poetry chapbook: writing the plot about sets.
Prose memoir: True.

2001.
Poetry: Veil: New and Selected Poems.
Poetry: The Pretext.

2004.
Poetry: Up to Speed.

2007.
Poetry: Next Life.
Prose: Collected Prose.

2009.
Poetry: Versed.

2010.
Poetry: Pulitzer Poetry Prize (U.S.A) for Versed.
Poetry: National Book Critics Circle Award (U.S.A).

2011.
Poetry: Money Shot.

2013.
Poetry: Just saying.

2015.
Poetry: Itself.

2016.
Poetry: Partly : new and selected poems, 2001-2015.

Books.

Links and Books.