Saturday, February 21, 2009

Rae Armantrout Tonight at D.G.Wills Books

D.G.Wills Books: "Acclaimed Poet

Rae Armantrout
will read from her new book
Versed
Saturday, February 21st, 7pm .

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. Rae Armantrout is Professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of ten books of poetry."

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous6:31 PM PDT

    I read the first 64 pages of Versed. I don't want to believe I'm too stupid to understand her great genius. Maybe she isn't a genius. Maybe she's been pulling people's legs all these years and nobody wants to speak up and say..hey craphead..stop pulling my damn leg and go find yourself a job somewhere raking leaves. I don't want to believe I'm too stupid to understand...

    ReplyDelete
  2. You're not stupid, and Rae Armantrout is not pulling anyone's leg.

    ReplyDelete

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