Finalists

Author: Rae Armantrout

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press (2022)

What will we call the last generation before the looming end times? With Finalists Rae Armantrout suggests one option. Brilliant and irascible, playful and intense, Armantrout nails the current moment's debris fields and super computers, its sizzling malaise and confusion, with an exemplary immensity of heart and a boundless capacity for humor. The poems in this book find (and create) beauty in midst of the ongoing crisis.

CONTRAST

What's to like
if not contrast?

Shadows beneath
the model's sharp

cheekbones, her ample
yet precise lips.

Clean lines separating
bounty
from its opposite.

This is not
what I want

to want.

These eyes
on the hypothetical

distance.

"Rae thinks in poetry by now that must be it. That one can turn out book after perfect book and it turns out they are all made of poems but what are poems made of. Rae I think. What she is."

–Eileen Myles

"I have great respect for the recalcitrance of Rae Armantrout's poetry. Every line is a twist and every twist a glimpse into a world animated by thought's incipient edges. Her sheer, often hilarious, ingenuity is an aesthetic triumph. Her social care creates a space in which life comes to life."

–Charles Bernstein