Wobble
3/5
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About this ebook
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rae Armantrout is at once a most intimate and coolly calculating poet. If anyone could produce a hybrid of Charlie Chaplin's playful "Little Tramp" and Charlize Theron's fierce "Imperator Furiosa," it would be Armantrout. Her language is unexpected yet exact, playing off the collective sense that the shifting ground of daily reality may be a warning of imminent systemic collapse. While there are glimmers here of what remains of "the natural world," the poet confesses the human failings, personal and societal, that have led to its devastation. No one's senses are more acutely attuned than Armantrout's, which makes her an exceptional observer and reporter of our faults. She leaves us wondering if the American Dream may be a nightmare from which we can't awaken. Sometimes funny, sometimes alarming, the poems in Wobble play peek-a-boo with doom.
Rae Armantrout
RAE ARMANTROUT has published eighteen books of poetry including Versed, which received a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for a National Book Award; Finalists; Conjure; Wobble (finalist for a National Book Award); Partly: New and Selected Poems; Itself; Just Saying; and Money Shot. Armantrout is Professor Emerita of Writing at the University of California at San Diego. She has been published in many anthologies, including, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and Scribner's Best American Poetry, and in such magazines as, Harpers, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Scientific American, Chicago Review, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
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Reviews for Wobble
10 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I understood very few poems in this collection and liked even fewer. For the most part these poems are very choppy. Most of the poems have a title, and then a few phrases making a sentence, then a break and another set of phrases that connects to the title maybe but not the first section, and the a third section.Not my cup of tea at all. I can't link the sections together, and most of the time I didn't know what she was getting at. I prefer poetry about experiences or nature, not about...thoughts? I did like: SilosTunnel VisionRefresh
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5As the Beats of the 50s faded and the late 60s ushered in the "Language" (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) poets, a new focus, perhaps, was achieved that looked at language-meaning-as-construction, implicating the reader as proactive mediator... or, we can just sit back and enjoy the poetry..."Look,/ in this spread/ for leather products,/ a stern-faced man/ in pink pants/ and a bomber jacket/ stands on satin sheets/ in front of a leopard print/ wallpaper/ holding a small briefcase/ or purse.// The market hates you/ even more/ than you hate yourself." (Brian)
Book preview
Wobble - Rae Armantrout
Making
What made this happen?
you ask every time
as if
compulsion itself
were mandatory,
the way light travels
at the speed of light
because it must
It is in no sense
essential
that this crown of leaves,
sifted by wind
as if turning over
some problem,
is a gray-green
brightening into rust-red
at the tips
or that its equivocations
fill this instant
to the brim.
While light
has caught up
to itself
again
and only seems
to be making
time
Asymmetries
I’m thinking about you and you’re humming while cutting a piece of wood.
I’m positive you aren’t thinking about me which is fine as long as you
aren’t thinking about yourself. I know and love the way you inhabit
this house and the occasions we mutually create. But I don’t know
the man you picture when you see yourself walking around
the world inside your head and I’m jealous
of the attention you pay that person
whom I suspect
of being devious.
Speech Acts
Something’s going around.
The crows
started it.
No language
can tell us
which crow.
You who
in the
mama turnpike
sexy tough shit
steady state
thought bubble song
churn
What’s new? Presence
as fad.
Humans
photo-bomb the planet,
pop up everywhere
because incongruous
is funny
and we want you
to know
The Craft Talk
So that the best thing you could do, it seemed, was climb inside the machine
that was language and feel what it wanted or was capable of doing at any
point, steering only occasionally.
The best thing was to let language speak its piece while standing inside it—
not like a knight in armor exactly, not like a mascot in a chicken suit.
The best thing was to create in the reader or listener an uncertainty as to
where the voice she heard was coming from so as to frighten her a little.
Why should I want to frighten her?
Conflation
As a tree
is concerted
atmosphere. Each
one a certain
ambience
drawn in and held
until it turns
green?
You go on
drawing energy
from