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.
"There are two sections, or 'books,' in this book (one called 'Finalists,' the other called 'Threat Response'), and sometimes it feels like there are two Armantrouts too. One pursues, just as she has for decades, a wonderfully spiky left-wing skepticism about capital and discourse and patriarchy and 'plastic' Another one just chases beauty But really there can be only one Armantrout, and she's all
Stephanie Burt
"As with all poets who succeed in conjuring an idiosyncratic verisimilitude to the world as we know it, her poems bestow intimate, authentic gifts of reality on the reader..."
David Woo
"Throughout Finalists, etymologies inflate and implode, contradict and contort, resisting motion as if they were two magnets connecting. Making new meaning of familiar references is part of this dance of contrast; pop culture grounds Armantrout's work in the contemporary world, while physics, genetics, and botany enshrine it with her exquisite L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E."
