Versed (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Editorial Reviews. From Publishers Weekly. Starred Review. In recent years, Armantrout's Versed (Wesleyan Poetry Series) by [Armantrout, Rae].
Table of contents

Eyeshot Scintillating new work from a celebrated contemporary poet. The Father of the Predicaments Whether sorrowful or sassy, the poems in this new collection bear McHugh's signature: Shades An exquisite series of poems that explore living and dying. The Book of Landings Exile, or auditions for utopia, in a time before this.

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A Visit to Civilization A meditation on brokenness and wholeness, history and forgetting. Edge Effect Trails and Portrayals Constructed in two parts, this collection embraces secretly related worlds: Representing 28 years of work, these poems descripe the voyage on which mother and daughter embarked. Interspersed are poems by Phoebe. The Little Edges Poems that play in the sonic texture of discourses. Fall A single word holds a narrative of the human condition. Songs and Stories of the Ghouls An epic poem of genocide, designed to create power for the dead.

Public Figures An investigation of the gap between sight and site. Ten to One Selected Poems The first selected poems from one of the most inventive poets writing today. A haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry. NourbeSe, as told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng. Plutzik, Hyam with David Scott Kastan, afterword. Lunch A direct and moving account of a young man's life in a time of plague.

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Breath Poems and Letters Rediscovery of a stunning achievement in modern Italian poetry. Pozzi, Antonia; Venuti, Lawrence, ed. Trans The first poetic exploration of transgender issues by the mother of a transgendered child. Divine Honors A transcendent account of the effects of breast cancer. Arcady A musical desert elegy on life born from loss. New Dark Ages Evocative poems about the most simple and complicated ideas. Beautiful Shirt The world that Revell ponders in these poems is replete with contrarieties, as he searches for the true nature of the self through language unfettered by narrative constraints and conventional conceptual identities.

Provoked in Venice The Rider Quintet, vol. The Couple The Rider Quintet, vol. Rider The Rider Quintet, vol. New Time The latest collection of poetry from one of the foremost American avant-garde poets. La Fontaine, Jean de. Selected Poems Collection of poems of great emotional investment. A Momentary Glory Last Poems The passionate testament of a brilliant poet in the face of age, illness, and mortality.

Wesleyan Poetry

Shapiro, Harvey; edited by Norman Finkelstein. Continued Spontaneous, colloquial, and anti-conventional verse from a celebrated Polish writer. Sommer, Piotr, August Kleinzahler, fwd. Alphabet Theater Intelligent, emotionally engaging multi-media performance poetry. Selected Poems Linguistically and formally audacious, Tarn is a true innovator. Selected Poems An award-winning gathering of exquisite poems by a celebrated poet.

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Distance from Loved Ones Clear and insightful poetry on our relationship to the given world. Exposition Park A midway of poetic styles and syllabic tableaux. The Cradle of the Real Life A poet speaks of the deaths and births that come within a life: Trilce A highly-praised translation of a seminal work of Spanish literature is once again available.

Van Dyck, Karen, trans. The Trailhead Visionary poems lay claim to the power of the female poet. Lullaby for One Fist A first collection of poems that explores the anatomy of destructive relationships. Meteoric Flowers A bold poetic intervention into the pastoral tradition. Address New poems from an original and challenging American voice. Using these strange candy bricks, Armantrout builds and rebuilds the fairy tale houses of "the real.

Jul 27, Bea rated it liked it. My experience of poetry is limited, so I am not a good judge of what makes poetry award-winning. I did not like the first section of this free thought-roaming verse. I could not grasp the subject or thread that held any of it within a frame. None of it spoke to me, and I was left wondering if I would be able to finish the book. However, the second part of the book, "Dark Matter", was a different experience. In this section, it was clear that the unifying thread was her experience with cancer. The thoughts that were expressed in the poetry made sense to me, even though in some ways they were as free-floating as the first section of the book.

This time they had a context for me. Jul 24, Kirsten Kinnell rated it it was ok Shelves: This collection really frustrated me. I felt like I'd been invited to a friend's house expecting to come in, take off my shoes and have some tea. Instead I was left out on the front porch knocking. Every now and again it seemed like the door opened a crack only to shut again the next moment. I'm reasonably intelligent and well-read and even with some effort I couldn't make heads nor tails out of most of these poems. Knowing that Armantrout is a "language poet" doesn't help much, it only makes me This collection really frustrated me.

Knowing that Armantrout is a "language poet" doesn't help much, it only makes me feel silly trying to make sense out of her work. I think this is why so many of my friends despise poetry-- this kind of thing makes it seem like an inside game with rules you'll never learn. Feb 23, Rick rated it it was amazing. One of the very best books by this incredible poet. I tried hard to read it slowly, but it wasn't easy to do that -- the jagged words and the crags of insight carved with them are so compelling as to demand page-turning.

I will be rereading these poems for a very long time. Nov 20, Chris Schaeffer rated it really liked it. Armantrout, like fellow early-langpo poet Lyn Hejinian, has kind of mellowed out with age and become less formally experimental. However, while Hejinian has gotten pretty cozy in her narrative cul-de-sac, Armantrout is still working with poetry as, most importantly, a field of linguistic play. She's really found a nice balance. Obviously, to garner a Pulitzer, she's writing stuff with very popular appeal, but it's still inventive and daring. I like her more recent book, 'Money Shots,' a bit more Armantrout, like fellow early-langpo poet Lyn Hejinian, has kind of mellowed out with age and become less formally experimental.

I like her more recent book, 'Money Shots,' a bit more, but 'Versed' is pretty remarkable in actually succeeding in pleasing everyone all the time. Jan 09, Courtney Clark rated it really liked it Shelves: I love language poets. As far as I'm concerned they always get top of the class. My problem, not hers. I kept forcing people to read passages, and scribbling down others when no one was around to bug.

Now I'm a little reluctant to give it back to the library.

Rae Armantrout summed it up herself in Fade, So much happiness is caged in language, ready to burst out anytime and fade THIS is how you earn y I love language poets. Rae Armantrout summed it up herself in Fade, So much happiness is caged in language, ready to burst out anytime and fade THIS is how you earn yourself a Pulitzer. Mar 14, Rachel rated it it was ok Shelves: I just can't rally behind this.

I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, but I couldn't help but feel locked out of these. It's all a matter of aesthetic differences, and I think I learned a lot from reading it, but in terms of loving a book of poems, I just can't say this was my favorite. Mar 02, Ryan rated it it was amazing Shelves: Aug 03, Vincent Scarpa rated it really liked it. Apr 22, Yifan rated it it was amazing. A poetic of uncertainties among familiarities.

Dec 30, Tristan rated it liked it Shelves: In truth, most of the poems fell into the "This was confusing and complicated, and I really don't find it interesting enough to spend forever fighting with it" category. The first section, "Versed" is more guilty of this than the second, "Dark Matter" although that was by no means innocent.

Some of Armantrout's phrases are great, for example: I did like, "Previews," and "Report". The poem "Pass" was cool as well, a bit confusing, but neat. It has lots of different possible interpretations and I only had to read it two or three times to figure out what was going on: An exploration of the nature of cancer? These couple of really great poems is what saved the collection from being a flat two stars, especially since it is billed as two "sequences", saying "Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves.

I shall have to look for Rae Armantrout in magazines and anthologies and see if those poems maintain the sharp-edged brilliance of the best of these, yet are coherent enough to be published alone. Most poems had some of the brilliance of the best buried in the confusion and babble , and the three mentioned poems aren't the only good ones, but overall, the collection seemed weak.

Often, a good section of a poem would have stood alone as a haiku or similar poem fairly well, but when lumped with other bits it lost its brilliance in the feeling of "not following" from the rest of the piece. Jul 20, Rui Carlos da Cunha rated it really liked it Shelves: The Mono-Culture is the hegemony of the vulgar. The cry of "I don't understand it! Cultural authority has gone into complete reverse: I only ask because I enjoy reading her writing, I just feel that I don't get the nature or the context to what she has written.

She makes writing appear simple: It's like reading an inside joke only the poet understands, brilliant snippets which read like a book of fragments, language broken, context removed, syntax deferred, all rules overruled, poetics 'reinvented'. Perhaps only someone trained in reading post-modern poetry will really get what Rae is doing with language, or the Pulitzer Prize Committee. For myself, I realize that I must be a vulgarian of the first order, since I'm one to cry, "I don't get it!

I don't understand it! Mar 29, Logan rated it really liked it Shelves: But the images she presents are displayed with a steady hand; she knows when to just let a scene stand--to pose for its own photograph, smiling the smile it chooses. And the fine-tuning her vertical line necessitates is present is a quiet, almost masterful way. Perhaps her skill in this regard seems enhanced when compared with Graham Foust's Leaving the Room to Itself , read simultaneously, which used little to do even less, usually.

But Armantrout has things to say, and the saying itself isn't her sole purpose.

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Dec 17, Mari rated it it was ok. I was surprised by how little I enjoyed this book, as I very much expected to be pleased by it. I did not find it difficult, which is apparently the common complaint, but in reading Armantrout's poetry I did not feel inspired, contemplative, or intrigued; I did not relish in the language, or in the poet's wit; in short, I got nothing from the collection.

The poem I most enjoyed was "Around," which I did find clever, disconcerting and witty; it, alone in the collection, made me think about the wo I was surprised by how little I enjoyed this book, as I very much expected to be pleased by it. The poem I most enjoyed was "Around," which I did find clever, disconcerting and witty; it, alone in the collection, made me think about the world as the poet represented it, forcing me to contemplate matters from a new and exciting perspective.

For the rest of the volume, however, I mainly contemplated how long it would take me to get through it--and which volume of poetry I'd choose to read next to make up for my disappointment. Apr 13, Raffi rated it liked it. Armantrout's poetry poses contemporary experience and language as "uncanny," but it often comes off as a disingenuous pose.

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. A reader's companion is available at http: Read more Read less. Save Extra with 1 offer. Customers who bought this item also bought. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. In Defense of Nothing Wesleyan Poetry. Review blog" Bookforum" Times Literary Supplement" "Trying to read a book by Rae Armantrout in a single sitting is like trying to drink a bowl of diamonds.

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Write a product review. Most helpful customer reviews on Amazon. As I write this thirteenth review, the star-ratings are stretched out like I've never seen them anywhere else: A spread as hard to understand as Armantrout's most confusing poetry. Let's look at some specifics. Language poetry is poetry that allows itself to include nonsense, passages that don't mean anything coherent or paraphrasable.

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This goes back to "hey nonny" in the old Elizabethan songs, and comes right up to rock band names like Jefferson Airplane or The Grateful Dead. It happens, by accident or on purpose, in very beloved modern poets like Dylan Thomas. Still, some people are against it on principle. Those people can't be talked to, but they're politically active, hence some of the one- and two-star reviews. Opening at random to page 30, where poets tend to put their not quite top stuff, I find the poem "Bonded. Pathos of strangers' headlights tracing the curve at dusk is inexplicable.

That makes perfect sense, I've experienced the pathos myself, I agree it's inexplicable, and I'm glad someone else saw it and wrote a poem about it. I also think that in a nonsense context, sections that so to speak leap into meaning like this feel especially good and interesting. I like the way she doesn't say "The pathos," but just "Pathos," making the pathos stand out especially sharply because losing "the" makes the sentence a tiny bit ungrammatical, and because it gives "Pathos" a line of its own. This is not a new technique she's known to have learned from Williams and Creeley, and I've listened to amateur poets who drive me crazy leaving out "the" all over the place but it works well here.

A previous section of "Bonded" reads: A want, conceived as illusory rhetorical is said to underlie the real, underwrite matter. To me, this is idealistic nonsense, but I like the feel of it. It suggests that human need creates the universe, an idea I especially hate, because I'm a skeptic. But I like how it's expressed here. I like the way some universal need can also be said to be an illusion universal need certainly IS an illusion AND a piece of rhetoric, and I like the idea that this illusion "underlies," doesn't show itself, like the elephant the earth rests on, another idea I don't believe in and still like, still find charming.