Have you ever felt that your world—from nuts to newspapers, travelogues to traffic lights—looks like something soaked through with lies? Have you ever felt that the choices you have made in life might be just effects of impersonal forces (such as social class or family habit, or the all-American pressure to buy more stuff)? Do you find yourself attracted to writers who test those uneasy and isolating feelings, and whose difficult, terse language tries to reveal suspicions that most of us hide?

If so, have I got a poet for you. Rae Armantrout first turned up in the late 1970s in the gaggle of left-wing, challenging (sometimes impenetrable) writers known as “language poets.” Unlike many of them, she gives her poems distinguishable subjects, and she keeps them sharp and short: they reflect not only her suspicion of systems (patriarchy, the market economy, habit) but also her astringent, self-questioning temperament.

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—Stephen Burt