"Armantrout's love of language and the joy she brings to shaping make this a welcome balm for uncertain times. Short, focused poems address topics ranging from the connection between beauty and significance to the sickening regularity of mass shootings in America. Other subjects are more innocuous, with often humorous imagery: a cauliflower head is 'made of/ little noggins' while a palm frond 'shimmies/ like a tambourine.'"
~Publishers Weekly
"Armantrout, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, observes the world through a lens that zooms in, magnifies, critiques, and describes with precision and pragmatism. The poems are also concerned with how language and meaning are made and how that subsequently affects one's experience of the world. Whether it is the likes and shares of social media, the next generation of AI, or the observant naming of beautiful objects, Armantrout's latest poems are timely and timeless."
~Sara Verstynen, Booklist
"Go Figure—this collection is full of the delights of Armantrout's inquisitive mind, sleight of language, and distinctive telescopic and microscopic juxtapositions. Armantrout's sharp—eyed approach to language and meaning has always been especially attuned to our times, when fragmentary images and sayings brush up against each other in our overstimulated lives. Armantrout keenly describes the stakes of our time and the state of our humanity in 'Seeing Reason,' which wonders about our acceptance of the status quo, the society that so easily flicks through all manners of apocalyptic signs and asks: 'What was the point of warnings / when desiccation, inundation, / plague, extinction, and / the murder of children / were on constant display?'"
~Mandana Chaffa, Chicago Review of Books
"'Words were gods— / arbitrary, deathless,' writes Rae Armantrout. In books that have appeared since the 1970s and by now transcend the labels (Black Mountain, Language Poetry) attached to mentors and peers like Denise Levertov and Ron Silliman, she has honed an enduring art on the ephemera that constitutes a consciousness in motion through the present. Take her approach to the pandemic. By now we've seen so many pandemic poems that my eyes blear a bit when I see one on the page, but Armantrout's resolutely unsentimental one focuses on the fact that a virus is a 'set of instructions / for making instructions,' 'pure, unencumbered / value,' 'Money making money / in a host's cell,' which reminds me of the murderous, anti-vax shenanigans of the leader and party whose main purpose is making more money for the already rich.'"
~David Woo, Literary Hub
"Armantrout casts her attention to the world's unexpected occurrences and unusual species in poems that celebrate humanity's relationship to words in a time of global catastrophe."
~Maya Popa, Publishers Weekly
"[Armantrout's] spirited writing reflects the weirdness, the frequent interruptions, and the wide range of disjointed events and questions that can zip at us like meteor swarms on a 'normal' day. In the poem 'Reporting,' for example, her images jump from a snail on a hot sidewalk to a 'weather guy' shouting his forecast in 'fake rain,' to this: 'Diesel keeps things simple. I heard that today in what passes for the void.'"
~Si Dunn, Sagecreek Blog
"In the 46 years since Armantrout published her debut poetry chapbook, Extremities, rather than changing her style, she's come close to perfecting it. [T]he many who have come to know and love it will be satisfied by Armantrout's latest poetic reflections on the state of our world. Even as the poet questions their worth herself, she continues to address the important conversations in her unique way in poems that can be read over and over."
~Aiden Hunt, On the Seawall
