Money Shot

By Rae Armantrout

The poems in Money Shot are forensic. Just as the money shot in porn is proof of the male orgasm, these poems explore questions of revelation and concealment. What is seen, what is hidden, and how do we know? Money Shot's investigation of these questions takes on a particular urgency because it occurs in the context of the suddenly revealed market manipulation and subsequent "great recession" of 2008–2009. In these poems, Rae Armantrout searches for new ways to organize information. What can be made manifest? What constitutes proof? Do we "know it when we see it"? Looking at sex, botany, cosmology, and death through the dark lens of "disaster capitalism," Armantrout finds evidence of betrayal, grounds for rebellion, moments of possibility, and even pleasure, in a time of sudden scarcity and relentless greed. This stunning follow-up to Versed—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award—is a wonderfully stringent exploration of how deeply our experience of everyday life is embedded in capitalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780819571311

Rae Armantrout

RAE ARMANTROUTt has fifteen previous books including Versed, which received a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Finalists, Conjure, Wobble (finalist for a National Book Award), Partly: New and Selected Poems, Itself, Just Saying, and Money Shot. Armantrout is Professor Emerita of Writing at the University of California at San Diego. She has been published in many anthologies, including, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and Scribner's Best American Poetry, and in such magazines as, Harpers, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Scientific American, Chicago Review, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Book preview

Staging

1

Everything will be made new.

The precision coupling

and uncoupling,

the studied

blocking

and folding

have already begun.

2

Stillness of gauzy curtains

and the sound

of distant vacuums.

Prolonged sigh

of traffic

and the downward

curve of fronds.

The spray

of all possible paths.

Define possible.

Colony

As if

the space around

each particle were filled

with countless

virtual particles.

And the Lord said,

"I am aware

of weighing options,

of dither,

but the moment of decision

has always remained obscure."

Which one of these

do you most closely resemble?

Green stucco bungalow,

four brown gargoyles

on its flat roof.

Beehive Diva;

Rehab Idol.

Semi-transparent,

each

stinging jelly

is a colony.

The Given

Given potassium enough

and time,

the bougainvillea explodes

into

Reviews for Money Shot

[eidzior_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'd like to read "Versed" but this book was great. I got it from the Library and was reminded why I don't generally check poetry out from the library: I can't write my notes in the margins. Overall I really liked it but I need to get my hands on my own copy to fully absorb the work.