Pulitzer Prize-winning Rae Armantrout reads from her latest collection. Go Figure features keen, pithy meditations on a world that continues to surprise us.
The poems in Go Figure are concerned with “this ongoing attempt/ to catalog the world” in a time of escalating disasters. From the bird who “check-marks morning/once more//like someone who gets up/to make sure// the door is locked” to bat-faced orchids, raising petals like light sails as if about to take flight, these poems make keen visual and psychological observations. The title Go Figure speaks to the book’s focus on the unexpected, the strange, and the seemingly incredible so that: “We name things/ to know where we are.” Moving with the deliberate precision that is a hallmark of Armantrout’s work, they limn and refract, questioning how we make sense of the world, and ultimately showing how our experience of reality is exquisitely enfolded in words. “It’s true things fall apart.” Armantrout writes. ‘Still, by thinking/we heat ourselves up.”
Rae Armantrout is the award-winning author of eighteen books of poetry, most recently Finalists and Conjure. Her collection Versed won a National Book Award. a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in countless anthologies including Best American Poetry, In The American Tree and Language Poetries.
Read more about Go Figure here.