Review by Booklist Review
Armantrout explores existential questions with rare economy and often painful precision. Here the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet scrutinizes marketing slogans, corporate catchphrases, and metaphysical quandaries. I practice high speed de- / selection, states one speaker; another defiantly proclaims, Cancer / is old school. Armantrout offers her audience narrow but glistening clues to her own bafflement about old age, violence, and an increasingly globalized world, writing, I want to explore the post-hope zeitgeist. Not infrequently, the final lines in Armantrout's poems kick the reader in the gut. In The Music Teacher, we see a mundane practice room where a plump young man in a cardigan sings off-key about a list of clothes your kids will need to get / at Target. The poem even promulgates its themes by using the adjectives redundant and generic. A less skilled writer might have let the poem descend into a humdrum meditation about artistic ambition dying in the face of domestic obligations. Armantrout, however, deposits us in the school's red-hot boiler room with the closing line: You and your children are in it together.--Alessio, Carolyn Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Armantrout's 2010 Pulitzer (for Versed) moved her from avant-garde paragon to a much more widely-and no less deeply-admired station: this second book since then (10th overall) finds her excelling in familiar yet challenging laconic modes, alert to the hypocrisies of daily life, the stresses and fears of adulthood, and the contradictions within our own desires. "I want to explore/ the post-hope zeitgeist," Armantrout quips, and sometimes she does: in a poem about action movies and politics, "America/ has a lucid dream," while in a tenderly frightening poem about motherhood, flowers, cold weather and firewood, "Each baby's soul/ is cute/ in the same way." Where recent volumes looked at her own life, before and after a diagnosis of cancer, this one more often turns outward into the shared facts of age and death, or at the oddities of our shared culture, with its superhero movies, its silly politics, its "lovely, fanged teenagers,/ red-eyed smeared with blood." No poet gets caustic, or self-critical, or sarcastic, as well as Armantrout, whose quick stanzas-half Twitter, half Emily Dickinson-say a lot about how language, money, love, and memory can fail us, and in very little space. This collection, in particular, might give readers still on the outside of Armantrout's brilliance a set of new ways in. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
It's surprising how much jagged energy courses through the typically spare, distilled poems in this latest book by Armantrout, a distinguished poet who finally, deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2009's Versed. From violins coursing downward and monomaniacal hummingbirds, to "fire in a cage,/ gnawing on wood" and "bushes/ flowering furiously," to the poet herself "practic[ing] high speed de-/ selection," energy-veering up, gearing down, ever driving us forward-is Armantrout's very subject. That, and the balance we strike as we are buffeted about between beginning and end ("The difference// between nothing/ and nothingness// is existence"). Being "balanced," though, is something achieved only through constant readjustment, redefinition, de-selection (it's also the solid-as-rock, one-word closing line of the poem "Subdivision"). Life darts restlessly about: "This train of thought/ is not a train,// but a tendril,/ blind"; one poem even ends open-endedly with the lines "slim trunks bend/ every which". It's all very refreshing, even, dare one say, energizing. -VERDICT Armantrout is sometimes accused of being inscrutable, but these terse, innocent-looking poems deliver scary insight. Highly recommended.-Barbara -Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
