Go Figure

While Pulitzer Prize winner Armantrout’s recent Finalists is reverberant with connection, her new book plunges deeper, analyzing our analyzing, considering how we make sense of the world through language and corollary. She worries about “this ongoing attempt / to catalog the world,” wondering whether “formulating / a problem / in the starkest / possible way…is helpful?” But she persists, noting the progression from spring’s “firethorn / pimples” to winter’s “kitsch,” how we sort the world (“spin[ning] yellow into patronage”); “how “rhythm / once defined distance— // I mean domesticated it.” Two crows on a wire “is the beginning / of a story / with two characters”—we always jump into making patterns, making stories, making sense—but does our understanding the world, our efforts to control it, ultimately change it, never getting to its essence? Indeed, patterns can contort—Armantrout writes that, as a young woman, “I knew I would have to / empty myself to fit inside / the songs”—and perhaps the trademark spareness of her writing aims to avoid that as much as possible.