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- Wobble
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.
Making
Asymmetries
Speech Acts
The Craft Talk
Conflation
Overtake
Audience
Background Information
Wobble
Reception
My Pleasure
My Bad Self
You Know
Object Permanence
Arch
Feeling Today
Boreal
Say
Regime Change
Credible
Return
Openings
Conjunctions
Incoming
Accomplices
Hoard
Hell
Silos
Trellis
The Emotional Life of Plants
Those
Alone
Echoes
Thorned
Revisions
What's Coming
Tunnel Vision
Incorporation
The Third Person
Flicker
My Erasures
Rankings
Chronos
Old Woman's Lament in Autumn
Sparks
To
Practicing
Are
Shapes
Object
Design Elements
Some Body
I and I
Household
Mother
Chord
Chimera
Near
Life History
A Few Questions
The Difference
Instruction
In the Future
The Trick
Accordingly
Moment to Moment
Fusion
Seams
Nothing
Distinguish
Presents
Spun
Traffic
Negotiations
Refresh
Translations
Signaling
Bees
The Show
Vessels
The Act
Inner
Object Lessons
Normal
Hate
Ahead
Give Pause
Hence
Somewhere
Judgment
Logistics
Flux
Cottage Industry
Practice
Trance
It Is
So
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.
"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
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