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Next Life
In her latest collection, Rae Armantrout considers the shaping effects of language in the context of new and frightening global realities. Attempting to imagine the unimaginable and see the unseen, Armantrout evokes a "next life" beyond the current, and too often degraded, one. From the new physics to mortality, Armantrout engages with the half-seen and the half-believed. These poems step into the dance of consciousness and its perennial ghost partner--"to make the world up/of provisional pairs." At a time when our world is being progressively despoiled, Armantrout has emerged as one of our most important and articulate authors. These poems push against the limit of knowledge, that event-horizon, and into the echoes and phantasms beyond, calling us to look toward the "next life" and find it where we can.
88 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
4 people are currently reading
378 people want to read
About the author
Rae Armantrout
76 books108 followersRae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. She has published ten books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics.
On March 11, 2010, Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her book of poetry Versed published by the Wesleyan University Press, which had also been nominated for the National Book Award. The book later earned the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Armantrout’s most recent collection, Money Shot, was published in February 2011. She is the recipient of numerous other awards for her poetry, including most recently an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.
On March 11, 2010, Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her book of poetry Versed published by the Wesleyan University Press, which had also been nominated for the National Book Award. The book later earned the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Armantrout’s most recent collection, Money Shot, was published in February 2011. She is the recipient of numerous other awards for her poetry, including most recently an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
July 3, 2008
Most of the poems in this collection are gorgeous in the sense that their lines and images intellectually emotional. However, there were a few poems that felt devoid of anything other than clever-ness (and the kind that's a little show-off-y).
Themes of science, motherhood, after-life, nature, and urban landscape are prevalent in this collection, and they all come together quite nicely in an associative lyric style.
I keep thinking as much as I like this style and am drawn to it, I am skeptical of its intelligence and its "making a statement."
Themes of science, motherhood, after-life, nature, and urban landscape are prevalent in this collection, and they all come together quite nicely in an associative lyric style.
I keep thinking as much as I like this style and am drawn to it, I am skeptical of its intelligence and its "making a statement."
March 24, 2009
If you are a fan of Oppen's "Of Being Numerous," I think you should give this book an afternoon. And then the rest of your life. And then your "next life," whatever that means to you. One stanza that might remind you of Oppen: "How many traits/must a thing have/in order to be singular?" (7). You might not respond to this work if you are the kind of human that would "confuse intelligibility with purpose" (50). Like Oppen, Armantrout can do more with ten words than many poets can do with fifty. I don't really know what that means to you, and it might not mean anything. Some might argue that economy equates with simplicity, but I would not describe this book as simple. There is a lot here to ponder. Are words more precise than sight? What does "once" mean? How are black holes born from questioning? And many others that will keep you up all night, if you are so inclined. It made me feel lightheaded with the staggers.
August 27, 2021
Yoohoo
Sun lights up a pelt
of dust on the receiver.
Being unexpected,
this is a kind of call.
Cross names out
and things are all made up
of contrary, percussive,
adjectival tugs.
I remember someone
wrestled an angel,
a signal.
*
The present's chronic
revision
which a poem
reenacts.
The open vowel
(peek-a-boo)
pelvis
through which you
"came into this world"
sits on the shelf
in a mausoleum now,
world on either side of it
Sun lights up a pelt
of dust on the receiver.
Being unexpected,
this is a kind of call.
Cross names out
and things are all made up
of contrary, percussive,
adjectival tugs.
I remember someone
wrestled an angel,
a signal.
*
The present's chronic
revision
which a poem
reenacts.
The open vowel
(peek-a-boo)
pelvis
through which you
"came into this world"
sits on the shelf
in a mausoleum now,
world on either side of it
February 27, 2024
Herlezen nu mijn bibliotheek die jarenlang in dozen heeft gezeten is uitgepakt. Intelligent en geestig, maar ook wat slimmig en formalistisch. Ik heb nog liggen van haar: Money shot, dat rond de jaren van de financiële crisis is geschreven.
August 1, 2021
HEADLINE SONG
Bush vows victory
over terror.
For the orphans,
nightmare lasts.
Well hang on
to what proved useful.
Eggs are full
of flame retardant.
Bush vows victory
over terror.
For the orphans,
nightmare lasts.
Well hang on
to what proved useful.
Eggs are full
of flame retardant.
March 17, 2022
Too random and abstract for my taste. I don't think I connected with any of these poems at all.
July 29, 2024
GOAT
August 3, 2025
I wish I loved this one more. But it felt more like words words words.
2: sc2025
2: sc2025
May 12, 2012
Rae,Armantrout is a poet of intensely private language whose seeming fragments of sentences, scenes and interior recollections still read vividly, provocatively.A member of the Language group of poets whose other members include Ron Silliman, Bob Perleman and Lynn Hejinian among other notables, she has distinguished herself from the frequently discursive style that interrogates the boundaries between the nominal power of language and the contradictions that result when conventional meaning rubs against insoluble fact, Armantrout's poetry is brief, terser, more taciturn and pared to the essential terms and the sensations they conflate. More autobiographical, perhaps, more concerned with raising a sense of genuine autonomy from the words one employs to define direction and purpose, Armantrout's poetry is an on going inquiry about what lies beyond our expectations once they've been given the lie. As in this fine collection's title,what is the "Next Life"? What she leaves out is fully formed by its absence;
We wake up to an empty room
addressing itself in scare quotes.
“Happen” and “now”
have been smuggled out,
to arrive safely in the past tense.
We come home to a cat
made entirely of fish.
--"Reversible"
Where a good many poets lavish their subjects with an overflow of language that twists and turns and deliberately problematizes syntax to achieve effects that are more stunts than perception or even an interrogation of an elusive notion, Armantrout's poetry is strong, stoic, lean to the degree that what remains are the resonances of a personality witnessing the truth when internal idealism and material fact don't compliment each other. Armantrout's poetry is a cool voice intoning over the varied scraps and arcana of experience, and crisply discovers, underlines and
speaks with a curt irony. There are things we've said we were, there are the things we've become, and there are the words we first used to make our declarations asserted again, though mutated, altered, given a few shades of new meaning to meet the demands of a life that becomes more complicated with small, distracting matters. There's a blunted, occasionally jagged feeling to Armantrout's lines, a cadence that will alternate between the hard, acute image, half-uttered phrases that seem like mumbles, and the juxtapositions of word and deed
that expose an archive of deferred emotion.
1.
"That's a nice red" you said,
but now the world was different
so that I agreed
with a puzzled
or sentimental certainty
as if clairvoyance
could be extended to the past.
And why not?
With a model sailing ship
in the window
of a small, neat house
and with a statuette
of a s t able boy
on the porch,
holding a lamp up
someone was making something clear--
perhaps that motion is a real character.
2.
How should we feel
about "the eraser"?
"Rampages" wears one expression
while "frantically" wears another:
conjoined twins,
miraculously separated
on Judgement Day?
Then "only nothingness"
is a bit vague.
But words are more precise than sight--
increasingly!
3.
The very old man shuffles very slowly
not between
the white lines of a crosswalk
but down one of them.
Like a figure in a dream,
his relations to meaning
is ominous.--
--"Agreement"
These are voices of of a consciousness that surveys several things at once;time is collapsed, details are suggested, associative leaps abound, and the phrase is terse, hard. Above all, this is a poetry of concentrated power; what is spoken here, the dissonance between expectation and the manner of how perception changes when idealism greets actual events and deeds, are the the things one considers late night, when there's nothing on cable, you've read your books, and only a pen and paper remains; what of me remains in the interactions, the negotiations, the compromises that constitute "making my way" in the world we might inhabit?This is a city of comings and goings, of people and their associations dancing and struggling with the invisible forces of repulsion and attraction; one seeks to transcend what it is that surrounds them, but find that their autonomy is merely a fiction shared only with the self when a community is lacking to applaud or argue with one's declarations of self. Armantrout gets to that small and hardly investigated phenomenon of how all of us--as readers, writers, consumers, family members--create our own dissonances in a manner that is intractable and ingrained. This is a fine, spare , ruminative volume by a singular writer
We wake up to an empty room
addressing itself in scare quotes.
“Happen” and “now”
have been smuggled out,
to arrive safely in the past tense.
We come home to a cat
made entirely of fish.
--"Reversible"
Where a good many poets lavish their subjects with an overflow of language that twists and turns and deliberately problematizes syntax to achieve effects that are more stunts than perception or even an interrogation of an elusive notion, Armantrout's poetry is strong, stoic, lean to the degree that what remains are the resonances of a personality witnessing the truth when internal idealism and material fact don't compliment each other. Armantrout's poetry is a cool voice intoning over the varied scraps and arcana of experience, and crisply discovers, underlines and
speaks with a curt irony. There are things we've said we were, there are the things we've become, and there are the words we first used to make our declarations asserted again, though mutated, altered, given a few shades of new meaning to meet the demands of a life that becomes more complicated with small, distracting matters. There's a blunted, occasionally jagged feeling to Armantrout's lines, a cadence that will alternate between the hard, acute image, half-uttered phrases that seem like mumbles, and the juxtapositions of word and deed
that expose an archive of deferred emotion.
1.
"That's a nice red" you said,
but now the world was different
so that I agreed
with a puzzled
or sentimental certainty
as if clairvoyance
could be extended to the past.
And why not?
With a model sailing ship
in the window
of a small, neat house
and with a statuette
of a s t able boy
on the porch,
holding a lamp up
someone was making something clear--
perhaps that motion is a real character.
2.
How should we feel
about "the eraser"?
"Rampages" wears one expression
while "frantically" wears another:
conjoined twins,
miraculously separated
on Judgement Day?
Then "only nothingness"
is a bit vague.
But words are more precise than sight--
increasingly!
3.
The very old man shuffles very slowly
not between
the white lines of a crosswalk
but down one of them.
Like a figure in a dream,
his relations to meaning
is ominous.--
--"Agreement"
These are voices of of a consciousness that surveys several things at once;time is collapsed, details are suggested, associative leaps abound, and the phrase is terse, hard. Above all, this is a poetry of concentrated power; what is spoken here, the dissonance between expectation and the manner of how perception changes when idealism greets actual events and deeds, are the the things one considers late night, when there's nothing on cable, you've read your books, and only a pen and paper remains; what of me remains in the interactions, the negotiations, the compromises that constitute "making my way" in the world we might inhabit?This is a city of comings and goings, of people and their associations dancing and struggling with the invisible forces of repulsion and attraction; one seeks to transcend what it is that surrounds them, but find that their autonomy is merely a fiction shared only with the self when a community is lacking to applaud or argue with one's declarations of self. Armantrout gets to that small and hardly investigated phenomenon of how all of us--as readers, writers, consumers, family members--create our own dissonances in a manner that is intractable and ingrained. This is a fine, spare , ruminative volume by a singular writer
April 10, 2016
Even though I studied this type of highly abstract poetry in graduate school, I can't say I kept up with it as a habit. So it seemed almost like a magic trick that while on my first reading of this book last week, I felt completely blind and uncomprehending, yet as soon as I read it a second time that same day, it came alive and showed me thoughts and a language I had never known before--I really felt as though I could suddenly read German, or Finnish, or whatever new language. I could hardly believe it, but it was like becoming a mind reader, and it was so amazing! Like one of those movie where you go to a new planet and can understand what the creatures are thinking and saying telepathically. I'm fascinated by the "less words is more meaning" concept, now. At least, that is what I'm calling it. Same goes even for Haiku (REAL Haiku, not the 5-7-5 syllable version). We fill our days with so many words. When we strip them back down, they hold so much more weight and meaning.
December 26, 2008
I love wordplay as much as anyone, but this was way too fragmented for my liking. I did like snippets such as these:
"How many traits must a thing have in order to be singular?"
"The Trinity was born from what we know of the bitter symbiosis of couples."
"Are similes reversible?"
"Moot points exude a certain charm -- although the transition from mattering to not is generally quite painful."
"The dream -- a froth of syllables and lights."
"The way sleep scrambles life's detritus."
"It's our felt distance from the supposed past as collectible."
But it never came together for me, in individual poems or as a collection.
"How many traits must a thing have in order to be singular?"
"The Trinity was born from what we know of the bitter symbiosis of couples."
"Are similes reversible?"
"Moot points exude a certain charm -- although the transition from mattering to not is generally quite painful."
"The dream -- a froth of syllables and lights."
"The way sleep scrambles life's detritus."
"It's our felt distance from the supposed past as collectible."
But it never came together for me, in individual poems or as a collection.
June 21, 2012
I love the way she puts words together and generates new meaning. She is extremely postmodern. I had trouble making sense or pulling my experiences into her work. I mainly read it for style and strategy.
May 27, 2013
This was probably the worst poetry collection I've ever read. Her thoughts are very random and unclear (and not in a good way, either) and often seemed like they were written by a five-year-old.
1 star.
1 star.
June 28, 2007
Five stars times twenty five.
Want to read
December 3, 2007[rec: critical mass blog]
December 28, 2007
How can her books keep getting better? It seems like there'd be some limit...
January 9, 2008
Come close
The crowd is made of
little gods
and there is still
no heaven
The crowd is made of
little gods
and there is still
no heaven
Read
September 24, 2008This is a great book for falling asleep to--having the most wonderful half-dreams of utter comprehension and delight between Armantrout's absurdly short stanzas.
October 16, 2008
I think this is her best, although I had to write a 25 page paper on it, which kind of ruined it for me.
February 28, 2009
the lyric and language poetry intersect here - love it
March 9, 2009
Ok, I didn't quite finish this, had to return it to the library. But I will finish it, I liked what I saw a lot, maybe more than I've liked a book of poetry in a long time.
May 7, 2009
She's no Lyn Hejinian, but I don't think even Lyn Hejinian is Lyn Hejinian if you know what I mean. It's postmodern. Anyway, as far as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets go, I dig.
July 4, 2009
very good ;)
June 14, 2010
She's coming to San Diego County Library Book Festival
Saturday October 9th 2010 at the Encinitas Branch Library
Won a Pulitzer Prize, currently at UCSD
Saturday October 9th 2010 at the Encinitas Branch Library
Won a Pulitzer Prize, currently at UCSD
April 28, 2011
"We ought to be frightened
of the reconstituted
prominal fizz
that invades us,
the wavery, weasely persistence
which, once we start to listen,
demands to be heard"
of the reconstituted
prominal fizz
that invades us,
the wavery, weasely persistence
which, once we start to listen,
demands to be heard"
November 4, 2011
Not my favorite Armantrout collection, but I'll return to it. I'm a fan.
April 18, 2018
My kind of poetry! Abstract yet deeply philosophical. My complete review is at:
https://youtu.be/f-cj_qM7zno
https://youtu.be/f-cj_qM7zno
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews