Rae Armantrout w/ fahima ife, SAFE ROOMS

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout returns to the store for her new collection Safe Rooms, and will be reading alongside professor and poet fahima ife. Safe Rooms, explores the undercurrents of modern life with an unflinching eye on human nature, social malaise, and the unsettling ways in which we attempt to protect ourselves from a world that continually undermines our sense of safety.

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Poetry of the shifting architecture of a world we think we know

Acclaimed author Rae Armantrout's remarkable new collection Safe Rooms, explores the undercurrents of modern life with an unflinching eye on human nature, social malaise, and the unsettling ways in which we attempt to protect ourselves from a world that continually undermines our sense of safety. As the title poem says: "your thoughts /roar and echo//around you—originating/god knows where.// You try to plug your ears/but you are an ear/ that can't stop listening." Through poems that examine our darker impulses—our tendencies to self-destruct, to grapple with envy, and to navigate the intricate web of family dynamics—Armantrout captures the complex, often contradictory ways in which we search for meaning and connection. Her work holds a mirror to the forces shaping us, both intimate and vast, showing that the so-called "safe rooms" we construct are fragile, temporary shelters, not havens from the chaos that surrounds us.

Rae Armantrout has published nineteen books of poetry including Versed, which received a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for a National Book 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.

fahima ife is the author of Septet for the Luminous Ones (Wesleyan University Press, 2024) and Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Brooklyn Rail, mercury firs, Obsidian, Indiana Review, Air/Light, Interim, and other places. She is associate professor of Black Aesthetics & Poetics in the Humanities at the University of California Santa Cruz. She co-founded and co-edits the indie micropress and poetry chapbook series, LUCIUS.