In her new (sixteenth) poetry collection, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rae Armantrout makes some bold and surprising moves in her lines, images, structures, and word choices.
The back cover flap of Go Figure promises some focus “on the unexpected, the strange, and the seemingly incredible….” And the poet delivers. Her 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.
Sometimes in Go Figure, a punctuated poem reaches its last line and is left hovering in the midair because its word flow suddenly stops, and no period marks its end.
Other times, in the poem “Forests” as one example, a delightfully fresh image pops out from the flow of other entertaining, absorbing mental pictures:
Each neuron
broadcasts its call sign
(plaintively?)
until another homes in
and a synapse forms.
Rae Armantrout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her book Versed. Her fifteen other books have been published during the time period of 1978 to 2022. She also has received a National Book Critics Circle Award and is Professor Emerita of Writing at the University of California at San Diego. She also is current judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
— Si Dunn
Si Dunn is the author of a novel, a novella, a work of nonfiction, and three books of poetry, including Words Taken from the Sky.
