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UC Berkeley special events, interviews, and lectures featuring distinguished faculty and guests. To view these events as webcasts visit webcast.berkeley.edu. Full course lectures available, too.

Rae Armantrout

Prepare yourself for "transformative and ingenious" work from a highly original and beloved California poet, Rae Armantrout, with graduate poet Charity Ketz.

Rae Armantrout?s poetry occupies a key position in contemporary traditions of experimental lyricism. Angular and ironic, unsettlingly humorous and precise, her work applies deft pressure to the idioms of everyday interaction, consumer culture, and dream. Armantrout?s poems are motivated by an ?activating desire for clarity," and yet it is a clarity that refuses easy certainties or disclosures. Instead, her rigorous lyricism works by way of acute juxtaposition and productive contradictions, creating a thrilling ?vertigo effect?** for its readers.

Her most recent book, Next Life (Wesleyan UP), pushes through narrative surfaces to arrive at the unexpected complexities subtending both language and event. Her "truly philosophical poetry" consistently reveals a "force of mind that contests all assumptions" (NYT Book Review).

Rae Armantrout has published nine books of poetry, including: Up to Speed (Wesleyan 2004), a finalist for the PEN USA Award in Poetry; Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001), also a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award, and The Pretext (2001). In 1998, Atelos Press published her prose memoir, True. She is a professor in the literature department at the University of California, San Diego, where she teaches writing.

Charity Ketz is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Cornell and the recipient of fellowships from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has published a chapbook, Locust in Bloom, through Poet's Corner Press, and has poems forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, New Orleans Review, and…