The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Book Cover for: Wobble, Rae Armantrout

Wobble

Rae Armantrout

Critic Reviews

Great

Based on 2 reviews on

BookMarks logo
Finalist:National Book Award -Poetry (2018)

Poems written on the shifting ground of imminent systemic collapse

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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
  • Publish Date: Nov 6th, 2018
  • Pages: 160
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.90in - 5.90in - 0.50in - 0.50lb
  • EAN: 9780819579096
  • Categories: American - General

About the Author

RAE ARMANTROUT is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of fourteen books of poetry. She has published nine books with Wesleyan University Press, including Entanglements, Partly, and Versed.

More books by Rae Armantrout

Book Cover for: Go Figure, Rae Armantrout
Book Cover for: Versed, Rae Armantrout
Book Cover for: Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2015, Rae Armantrout
Book Cover for: Finalists, Rae Armantrout
Book Cover for: Notice, Rae Armantrout
Book Cover for: Entanglements, Rae Armantrout
Book Cover for: Money Shot, Rae Armantrout
Book Cover for: Itself, Rae Armantrout
Book Cover for: Veil: New and Selected Poems, Rae Armantrout
Book Cover for: Next Life, Rae Armantrout
Book Cover for: Just Saying, Rae Armantrout
Book Cover for: Conjure, Rae Armantrout
Book Cover for: Up to Speed, Rae Armantrout

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"In language lean, intimate, and purposeful, this latest from Pulitzer Prize-winning Armantrout shifts constantly between public and private, abstract and concrete, known and unknown, surprising and delighting us as she delivers a sense of what's possible and of new ways of seeing."--Library Journal Best of 2018: Poetry

"With carefully planned havoc, Rae Armantrout takes a page from the jesters of old."--Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews

"Armantrout probes the place of sincerity in a post-modern cultural landscape in this formally dexterous and conceptually daring collection. [Her] intelligence and keen insight are equally present in the work's humor and cultural commentary."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A collection of tight, chiseled poems that forces readers to consider how greed, excess and lack of critical thought have led to environmental destruction and a nation wobbling toward the edge of collapse."--Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post

"With enjambment and double meanings, crystal-sharp images to muse on lost time and to take the private public.--C. Diane Scharper"--Library Journal