Versed

Front Cover
Wesleyan University Press, Feb 3, 2009 - Poetry - 121 pages

A double collection from one of the most brilliant poets of her generation

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2010)
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award (2009)
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry (2009)

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: "Metaphor forms / a crust / beneath which / the crevasse of each experience." Dark Matter, the second section, alludes to more than the unseen substance thought to make up the majority of mass in the universe. 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. A reader's companion is available at http://versedreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

 

Contents

II
3
III
5
IV
6
V
7
VI
8
VII
10
VIII
11
IX
13
XLVI
69
XLVII
70
XLVIII
71
XLIX
73
L
74
LI
76
LII
77
LIII
78

X
14
XI
15
XII
16
XIII
17
XIV
18
XV
20
XVI
22
XVII
24
XVIII
25
XIX
26
XX
28
XXI
30
XXII
32
XXIII
34
XXIV
35
XXV
37
XXVI
38
XXVII
40
XXVIII
41
XXIX
42
XXX
43
XXXI
44
XXXII
45
XXXIII
46
XXXIV
48
XXXV
50
XXXVI
51
XXXVII
53
XXXVIII
54
XXXIX
56
XL
58
XLI
60
XLII
62
XLIII
63
XLIV
64
XLV
67
LIV
80
LV
81
LVI
82
LVII
83
LVIII
84
LIX
85
LX
87
LXI
88
LXII
89
LXIII
90
LXIV
91
LXV
92
LXVI
93
LXVII
95
LXVIII
96
LXIX
97
LXX
98
LXXI
99
LXXII
101
LXXIII
102
LXXIV
103
LXXV
104
LXXVI
105
LXXVII
107
LXXVIII
108
LXXIX
109
LXXX
110
LXXXI
112
LXXXII
113
LXXXIII
114
LXXXIV
115
LXXXV
116
LXXXVI
117
LXXXVII
119
LXXXVIII
121
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About the author (2009)

RAE ARMANTROUT is professor emerita of writing at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of thirteen previous books of poetry.

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