Money Shot's main virtue is its clarity. Armantrout has something to do with the LANGUAGE poets, but at least in this book there's no sign of that movements sillier theoretical tendencies. Consider the last few stanzas of 'Prayers':

The blue triangles
on the rug
repeating.

Coming up,
a discussion
on the uses
of torture.

The fear
that all *this*
will end.

The fear
that it won't.

I experienced most of the book in the light of this poem: an elegy for liberals who can't quite believe what "their" country has become. This is the kind of emotion that makes no sense to me; I'm not American, I've never believed that America was anything other than what it manifestly is, and the feeling of loss that American liberals feel post 9/11 strikes me as, at worst, naive, and, at best, odd.

This is the first of Armantrout's books that I've read, and I'm impressed at how well she expresses this cultural moment. I do wish the poems showed a bit more distance from the moment, though.

The cover blurb (not the poet's fault, I'm sure) suggests that "Armantrout searches for new ways to organize information. What can be made manifest? What constitutes proof? 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 relentleess greed."

You read right: *sudden* scarcity. For whom? Anyway, the good news is that that's obviously a sales pitch to university professors. This is just good bedtime reading, sometimes pretty, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes just a teeny bit complicated. It has nothing, in other words, to do with the "dark lens" of disaster capitalism. ( )