Versed

Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. This volume brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writing. The poems in the first section, 'Versed,' play with vice & versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error & delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks. 'Dark Matter,' the second section, alludes to more than the unseensubstance thought to make up the majority of mass in the universe. The invisible & unknowable are confronted directly as Armantrout's experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit.