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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Versed
A double collection from one of the most brilliant poets of her generation
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2010)
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award (2009)
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry (2009)
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 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. A reader's companion is available at http: //versedreader.site.wesleyan.edu/
Book Details
- Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
- Publish Date: Aug 1st, 2010
- Pages: 136
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.90in - 6.00in - 0.40in - 0.50lb
- EAN: 9780819570918
- Categories: • American - General
About the Author
RAE ARMANTROUT is a professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of ten books of poetry.
More books by Rae Armantrout
What people are saying
Poetry Daily presents a poem each day from new books and journals, along with poetry news, announcements, and more. Est. 1997.
Today's Featured Poet: Rae Armantrout's book, Versed, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award in 2010. Retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics, she is the current judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. https://t.co/xMpVyplWTj
Alina Stefanescu is a poet and book reviewer.
The poems in "Dark Matter"and those at the end of "Versed" were written in the wake of a cancer diagnosis and surgery. That was almost three years ago, but, at the time, the prognosis was not good. - Rae Armantrout
Praise for this book
"Trying to read a book by Rae Armantrout in a single sitting is like trying to drink a bowl of diamonds. What's inside is all so shiny & clear & even tiny that it appears perfectly do-able. But the stones are so hard & their edges so chiseled that the instant you begin they'll start to rip your insides apart."--Ron Silliman, blog
"Armantrout's poetry has always been turned to the present moment. Its formal lineage is from William Carlos Williams and the Objectivists, with their enjambments of modern experience. Poetically, Armantrout has always aimed at knowing life by isolating it from narrative. Written under a diagnosis of cancer ("'I just called / to fill you in'"), Versed is a major and moving addition to a life's work in many-angled reflection."--Jeremy Noel-Tod, Times Literary Supplement
"Trying to read a book by Rae Armantrout in a single sitting is like trying to drink a bowl of diamonds. What's inside is all so shiny & clear & even tiny that it appears perfectly do-able. But the stones are so hard & their edges so chiseled that the instant you begin they'll start to rip your insides apart."--Ron Silliman, blog
"Rae Armantrout is the most philosophical sort of poet, continually seeking in her collections to summon and surmise the contemporary character of subjective experience and, further, to test the limits of knowledge. Armantrout's writing in her latest volume, Versed, will thus be familiar to her longtime readers for its way of holding meaning (and identification) in uneasy suspension. Short lines in brief poems are polyvalent in both voicing and implication, inviting multiple readings. yet pleasure arises in contemplating both the options and the paradox."--Tom Griffin, Bookforum
"Praise for Next Life: Poetry that conveys the invention, the wit and the force of a mind that contests all assumptions."--New York Times
"Always smart, given to sardonic humor, and surprisingly down-to-earth""--Publishers Weekly
What people are saying
Poetry Daily presents a poem each day from new books and journals, along with poetry news, announcements, and more. Est. 1997.
Today's Featured Poet: Rae Armantrout's book, Versed, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award in 2010. Retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics, she is the current judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. https://t.co/xMpVyplWTj
Alina Stefanescu is a poet and book reviewer.
The poems in "Dark Matter"and those at the end of "Versed" were written in the wake of a cancer diagnosis and surgery. That was almost three years ago, but, at the time, the prognosis was not good. - Rae Armantrout