Video from the 2009 National
Book Awards Finalist Reading
Photo credit:
Nancy Richards Wolfing, 2009
CITATION
In her tenth volume, Versed,
Rae Armantrout applies her signature wit to a singularly
difficult subject, cancer, showing it up close and with
compassion. She also takes on the dark matter of the
universe—that invisible whatzit that outweighs
all—as well as hypnotized spiders, flaming mice,
and perfect roses. Terse, condensed, these are poems
under pressure—open carefully—everything
here is concrete, insistently real, and loved by a demanding
intellect into new and arresting realities.
ABOUT THE BOOK
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. In the second section, “Dark
Matter,” 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rae Armantrout is the author
of ten books of poetry, including Versed, Next Life,
Up to Speed, and Veil: New and Selected Poems.
Her collected prose was published in 2007. She is a
professor of writing at the University of California
at San Diego. Armantrout has been published in numerous
anthologies, including The Oxford Book of American
Poetry and Scribner’s Best American Poetry
of 1998, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2007, and 2008,
and in such literary magazines as American Poetry
Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, and the
Los Angeles Times Book Review.
October 29th, 7PM
New York University
Reading Series
Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House
58th West 10th Street, btw. 5th & 6th Avenues
New York, NY
A wine reception follows. http://cwp.fas.nyu.edu/page/readingseries
November 2nd, 5–7
PM
San Diego State University
Scripps Cottage
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego, CA
Sponsored by the Poetry Society of SDSU, the Hugh C.
Hyde Living Writers Series, and Poetry International.
November 13th, 7–8:30
PM
de Young Museum Poetry Series
Koret Auditorium at the San Francisco Public Library
100 Larkin Street
San Francisco
415-750-7694
Free for de Young Museum members and all students with
valid IDs. $5 for all others.
January 23rd, 2010,
time TBA
The University of Chicago
The Poem Present Reading and Lecture Series
1010 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL http://poempresent.uchicago.edu/
March 17th, 2010, 8PM
with Norman Fischer
The Poetry Project @ St. Mark’s Church
Parish Hall
131 East 10th Street
New York, NY
212 674 0910
$8/General; $7/Students and seniors; Free for members
EXCERPT
From Versed, copyright
2009 by Rae Armantrout and reprinted by permission of
Wesleyan University Press.
