Cross-posted from PennSound:
All of us at PennSound couldn't be happier to hear last night's news that Rae Armantrout's Versed had been awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In their official citation, the NBCC praisedVersed for "its demonstration of superb intellect and technique, its melding of experimental poetics but down-to-earth subject matter to create poems you are compelled to return to, that get richer with each reading," while in a recent blog post highlighting finalists, James Marcus observes that Armantrout's work is "playful, poignant, and metaphysically alert?never more so than in Versed [...] whose vigilant, often beautiful poems seem to reset the reader?s mental instrumentation."
