Independent, skeptical, laconic, and always lyrical, Rae Armantrout is a poet of wit and precision. Her poems are typically built of brief sections and short lines in which every word and syllable has been carefully weighed and placed. She also values alacrity and surprise. Arcs of argument can end midflight or spring abruptly in unforeseen directions. The tone shifts, and shifts again. The rewards of her quicksilver verse are many: she helps, as William Blake once put it, to cleanse the doors of perception. You look anew at everyday things and delight in language’s myriad marvels and traps. You also laugh out loud.

Let Scott equal “I.”

Scott says, “I
asked my team
to pull your records.”

A human begins
by claiming

to be something else:

a red bird
in a picture book;

a little red
Corvette.

We wanted to tell someone everything

(or everyone something)—

how large and limp

the leaves were

in the half-sun,

but what is “half-sun,”

finally?

What’s to like
if not contrast?

Shadows beneath
the model’s sharp

cheekbones, her ample
yet precise lips.

Don’t worry.
We have armies
of showrunners

 

No lie!
Need input!
Not ghosting you!

More than a fistful
of stubby green fingers
pushing up through gravel.

Unlikely, 
the homelife
of water

 

The brain has powerful filters
that screen out most
thoughts and images:

Flag lolling 
on its pole
like a dog’s tongue.

With us, it’s about
choices.
How many kinds

Rae Armantrout recalls her childhood encounter with Zane Grey’s “Riders of the Purple Sage.”