Author(s): Rae Armantrout

Poetry

Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. "Versed" brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writing. The poems in the first section, 'Versed', play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks. In the second section, 'Dark Matter', the invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as Armantrout's experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking.