Money Shot (Hardcover)

Author: Rae Armantrout

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press (2012)

What is seen, what is hidden, and how do we know? Money Shot's investigation of these questions takes on a particular urgency because it occurs in the context of the suddenly revealed market manipulation and subsequent "great recession" of 2008–2009. In these poems, Rae Armantrout searches for new ways to organize information. What can be made manifest? What constitutes proof? Do we "know it when we see it"? Looking at sex, botany, cosmology, and death through the dark lens of "disaster capitalism," Armantrout finds evidence of betrayal, grounds for rebellion, moments of possibility, and even pleasure, in a time of sudden scarcity and relentless greed. This stunning follow-up to Versed—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award—is a wonderfully stringent exploration of how deeply our experience of everyday life is embedded in capitalism.

"Armantrout is continually calling into question the language she uses, and these choices are always elegant and amazingly intelligent, but there is genuine emotion in these poems."

–Nick Sturm

"Her follow up to Versed, the prize-winning volume, is due out from Wesleyan University Press in February, and it's a stunner."

–Craig Teicher

"Armantrout shows what a person with open eyes and open ears can contribute by organizing artifice and showing it for what it is—all the while maintaining a cleverness, intellectual authority and readability that make her one of the best page-poets in the world."

–John Denning

"Rae Armantrout's 'Soft Money,' from Money Shot, transplants the language of sexual desire into the context of the current economic meltdown."

–Tracy K. Smith