Rae Armantrout, Go Figure

 

REASONS

1

The snake was a fall guy.

That tree
was temptation enough.

Staged apples,
drop-dead gorgeous.

 

2.

“Not in my body!”
they shout.

Benzene in the shampoo;
lead in the water;
pesticide in fruit.

They mean the new vaccine, but
isn’t there more to it?

Water on fire;
neonicotinoids in nectar;
black and tarry
stools

The latest from San Diego poet Rae Armantrout [see my review of her prior collection here] is Go Figure (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2024), adding a further heft to an already heft of multiple award-winning poetry collections going back decades. There is something intriguing about how the poems in Go Figure cluster, offering Armantrout as less a poet of single, self-contained poems than sequences of gestural sweeps that cohere into this meditative book-length suite, threading through numerous ebbs and flows as she goes. Her poems interact with each other, including poems that end sans punctuation, suggesting a kind of ongoingness, beyond the scope of the single page. As the opening of the poem “SHRINK WRAP” reads: “An idea is / an arrangement // of pictures / of things // shrunken / to fit // in the brain / of a human.” Armantrout’s poems are constructed through extended lines of precise, abstract thinking, providing specifics that accumulate into something far larger, and far more coherent, than the sum of their parts. Armantrout’s poems throughout Go Figure offer points on a grid progressing a single extended sequence of thought, as the author addresses culture, climate and financial crises, as well as echoes and influence from her grandchildren. At the core, Armantrout’s poems articulate how our experiences are held by and solidified through words, the very foundation of language that allow shape and coherence, meaning and context to those very same experiences. As the poem “DOTS” opens:

Poems elongate moments.

“My pee is hot,” she said,
dreamily, mildly
surprised

There is something, too, about the openness of her lyric: if you haven’t read Armantrout’s work before, one might say that any book of hers might be a good place to start, but I’ll say this: if you haven’t read her work before, Go Figure is a good place to start. Or, as the first part of the two-part title poem reads:

First she made up the schedule,
and the rules,

Then the desire to break them or,
worse yet,
the yen to follow them.

You put your left foot out;
you pull your left foot in.

You do it all again
and laugh.

What next?

“Go figure,” she said.

Line up your letters
and shake them all about.

Play CAT,
then TAG.

Someone will play dead.