Finalists

Always superb at critiquing the specious language of late capitalism, Rae Armantrout titles her new collection Finalists after a headline from an online article about nature photography: “‘These wildlife finalists / will take your breath away’.” Devoid of context, the headline (quoted in the poem “Finalist”) is deliciously insipid but becomes profound the more one contemplates it, calling to mind the extinction of species and the fact that evolution makes all living creatures “wildlife finalists.” If Armantrout shows a new attention to aging and death in the COVID era, her aim is to gain insight and epiphany through the kind of astringent, epistemological estrangements that her work has long mastered. In “Your Attention,” the speaker hilariously insists that she doesn’t “have time to continue / reading / about spider cognition,” while in “The Steps,” she ponders the phrase “take a step back” (as from life), flowering plants lying dormant in September, and YouTube videos about kids “being themselves,” and asks:

What would it mean
for attention to be empty

like a phrase 
repeated too often?

While death is a central theme in this work, Finalists emanates the radiant astonishment of living thought: “mind,” the speaker says in “Surprise, Surprise,” “is the gape / of surprise / propped open.” “Who’s Who,” Armantrout’s reading of “Song of Wandering Aengus,” is all surprise, breathtakingly reductive in a way that uncovers something fresh and unsettling: the notion that Yeats’s lovely myth comes from a reactionary impulse to make “the world seem / more fuckable.” Like children’s play, which Armantrout likens to aliens’ attempting to communicate “by reproducing signals from old TV broadcasts,” the pleasures of this work are both tangible and ineffable. As with all poets who succeed in conjuring an idiosyncratic verisimilitude to the world as we know it, her poems bestow intimate, authentic gifts of reality on the reader, like the stone offerings of “Second Life”:

I like to collect smooth
multicolored rocks, 

so distinct from the dirt or mud
they rest on,

carry them awhile,
then set them down—

like this.