Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2015

Read the poems in Pulitzer Prize winner Armantrout's New and Selected and you feel both taken by the hand—short, precise couplets march you resolutely down the page—and left utterly alone. "Sun lights up a pelt/ of dust on the receiver./ Being unexpected,/ this is a kind of call./ Cross names out/ and things are all made up/ of contrary, percussive, adjectival tugs. I remember someone wrestled an angel,/ a signal." That last line, "a signal," breaks to the right, away from the pack. (She credits William Carlos Williams for teaching her line breaks.) This is the poet's mind at work: the fritz of memory playing with a shard of local landscape, a scrap of today's headline, a passing shadow—dispatched to the reader for decoding. It is also the mark of the West Coast group of Language poets, of whom Armantrout is a founding member.