Next Life

In her latest collection, Rae Armantrout considers the shaping effects of language in the context of new and frightening global realities. Attempting to imagine the unimaginable and see the unseen, Armantrout evokes a "next life" beyond the current, and too often degraded, one. From the new physics to mortality, Armantrout engages with the half-seen and the half-believed. These poems step into the dance of consciousness and its perennial ghost partner--"to make the world up/of provisional pairs." At a time when our world is being progressively despoiled, Armantrout has emerged as one of our most important and articulate authors. These poems push against the limit of knowledge, that event-horizon, and into the echoes and phantasms beyond, calling us to look toward the "next life" and find it where we can.

RAE ARMANTROUT is a professor of writing in the literature department at the University of California at San Diego, and the author of eight books of poetry, including Up to Speed (2003) and Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001).