Tag Archive for Rae Armantrout

“Un-American”, “Conjure”, and “The Age of Phillis” Longlisted for 2021 PEN Book Awards

We congratulate Hafizah Geter, Rae Armantrout, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who are all Longlisted for awards from PEN America.

PEN Open Book Longlist covers

Hafizah Geter’s debut poetry collection, Un-American, is Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. The PEN Open Book Award honors a work of fiction, literary nonfiction, biography/memoir, or poetry written by an author of color. The award was created by PEN America’s Open Book Committee, a group committed to racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities.

Geter’s collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you.

PEN/Voelcker Award Longlist book covers

We are also pleased to announce that Rae Armantrout’s Conjure and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis are both Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. The PEN/Voelcker Award honors a distinguished collection of poetry that represents a notable and accomplished literary presence.

Rae Armantrout has always taken pleasure in uncertainties and conundrums, the tricky nuances of language and feeling. In Conjure that pleasure is matched by dread; fascination meets fear as the poet considers an increasingly toxic world.

The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters. Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley’s “age”—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade.

From PEN America’s press release:

The Longlists for its 2021 Literary Awards span 11 book awards and encompassing more than 125 writers and translators, representing the year’s most extraordinary literary talents. Over 80 judges have selected the Longlists, which are made up of categories including the novel, short story collection, translation, poetry, science writing, essay, biography, and more. (Read the full release here.)

Finalists for PEN America Literary Awards will be announced in February 2021.

Announcing “Conjure”

buy from HFS Books

buy from Bookshop.org

“Independent, skeptical, laconic, and always lyrical, Rae Armantrout is a poet of wit and precision. … The rewards of her quicksilver verse are many: she helps, as William Blake once put it, to cleanse the doors of perception. You look anew at everyday things and delight in language’s myriad marvels and traps. You also laugh out loud.
–Brian Reed, Paris Review

“Unsettling, slippery intimations move just below the surface of Rae Armantrout’s enigmatic and unforgettable new collection of poems. For the record, Rae Armantrout is my favourite living poet.”
—Nick Cave

“How did the synthesis / cross the abyss?” A question each of us has been asking ever since we emerged from the tunnel of our mother, and one that poses itself more loudly as we near the next such channel. Rae Armantrout has always taken pleasure in uncertainties and conundrums, the tricky nuances of language and feeling. In Conjure that pleasure is matched by dread; fascination meets fear as the poet considers the emergence of new life (twin granddaughters) into an increasingly toxic world: the Amazon smolders, children are caged or die crossing rivers and oceans, and weddings make convenient targets for drone strikes. One third of all adults seem bent on killing another third, while the remainder passively watches, hoping that nobody gets too extreme. These poems explore the restless border between self and non-self. One and another tussle and blur. As Armantrout writes in “Conjure,” “In a sentimental story // there is only one / of something // one newborn, one moment…” or one place for our attention to land, while in fact there are countless species dwindling to extinction. These poems ask us to look with new eyes at what we’ve done and continue to do.

RAE ARMANTROUT is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of fifteen books of poetry. She has published ten books with Wesleyan University Press, including Entanglements, Partly, and Versed. She lives in Everett, Washington.

Versed by Rae Armantrout awarded Pulitzer Prize

The 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was awarded to “Versed,” by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan University Press), a book striking for its wit and linguistic inventiveness, offering poems that are often little thought-bombs detonating in the mind long after the first reading.
(Pulitzer Prize citation)
Read more here.