Rae Armantrout

Glare
March 25, 2013 Armantrout Rae

Glare

 

1

“It just goes so fast,”

says the receptionist,

your adverb here.

 

Indicate someone’s feeling state.

 

Appeal to the senses.

 

INVASION

 

in yellow block letters,

second story window.

 

 

2

The feeling is one.

 

The feeling is one of

following.

 

The feeling is one of following

a familiar trail

 

or legible sequence

 

between high walls,

 

between high walls

of noise

 

and glare

 

Rae Armantrout’s most recent books, Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, Itself, Partly: New and Selected Poems, Entanglements, (a chapbook selection of poems in conversation with physics), and Wobble were published by Wesleyan University Press. Wobble, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award, was selected by Library Journal as one of the best poetry books of 2018. Her book Conjure was published in 2020. Her newest book, Go Figure, is forthcoming in September 2024 – all from Wesleyan. In 2010 her book Versed won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2007 Armantrout received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetry,Conjunctions, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, Bomb, Harper’s,The Paris Review, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology, The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, several volumes of The Best American Poetry, etc. Her Paris Review interview in “The Art of Poetry” series will appear in December, 2019.  She is recently retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics. She now lives in the Seattle area.