Just Saying

Deft and deeply intelligent poems on the nature of language

In Just Saying, improbable and even untenable speakers are briefly constituted―only to disappear. The result is part carnival, part nightmare. A television pundit's rhetoric segues into an unusual succulent with writhing maroon tongues. When the world suddenly becomes legible, is that revelation or psychosis? In this book, the voice of the Lord and/or the voice of the security state can come from anyplace. The problem of identity becomes acute. The poems in Just Saying may be imagined as chimeras, creatures that appear when old distinctions break down and elements generally kept separate combine in new ways. Here Armantrout both worries (as a dog worries a bone) and celebrates the groundless fecundity of being and of language.

RAE ARMANTROUT is a professor of writing in the Literature Department at the University of California at San Diego, and the author of eleven books of poetry, including Money Shot, Versed, Next Life, and Veil: New and Selected Poems. Praise for Money Shot "Armantrout has the ability to magnify the merest of words into an essay. True to the postmodern tradition, she gives no answer to the provocative questions she raises. Instead Money Shot offers sure proof of one thing: A well-wrought book of poems." ―John Herbert Cunningham, Rain Taxi "…There are a lot of possibilities. Which is exciting, and frightening. … Indeed, the charged openness of language is itself enough to power these poems. … Let's play a game, Armantrout seems to say. This game has to do with language, and either it will destroy us or leave us alone on a sunny day. Take your pick." ―Nick Sturm, Laurel Review Praise for Versed "Rae Armantrout is the most philosophical sort of poet, continually seeking in her collections to summon and surmise the contemporary character of subjective experience and, further, to test the limits of knowledge. … Short lines in brief poems are polyvalent in both voicing and implication, inviting multiple readings … yet pleasure arises in contemplating both the options and the paradox." ―Tom Griffin, Bookforum "Written under a diagnosis of cancer ('I just called / to fill you in'), Versed is a major and moving addition to a life's work in many-angled reflection." ―Jeremy Noel-Tod, Times Literary Supplement