Itself

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Armantrout (Versed) offers poems so spare that they feel like dry leaves brushing across the page, but what's packed into them, the intensive reflection, both personal and social, is remarkable. In her latest collection, she concisely phrases and rephrases questions on what this world is about and how we exist in it, "doing whatever it takes to// whatever because,// really." Armantrout is interested in how we experience the moment and then interpret it ("I take these white streaks// of truck// glimpsed/ between branches// to be blossoms"), showing that we wear masks even as we play by the rules. And if we "consist/ of infinitesimal points// of want," we're also a flow of experience and in the flow of experience, "because 'first'/ was part of 'now'/ from the very start." Life is like light, then, both particle and wave, and a definite radiant energy crackles through this book almost in defiance of the its cleanly polished surface; Armantrout is nothing if not accomplished in her craft.