Money Shot

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet searches for new ways to understand the world in the wake of the Great Recession

The poems in Money Shot are forensic. Just as the money shot in porn is proof of the male orgasm, these poems explore questions of revelation and concealment. What is seen, what is hidden, and how do we know? Money Shot’s investigation of these questions takes on a particular urgency because it occurs in the context of the suddenly revealed market manipulation and subsequent ＂great recession＂ of 2008-2009. In these poems, Rae Armantrout searches for new ways to organize information. What can be made manifest? What constitutes proof? Do we ＂know it when we see it＂? 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 relentless greed. This stunning follow-up to Versed--winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award--is a wonderfully stringent exploration of how deeply our experience of everyday life is embedded in capitalism.

RAE ARMANTROUT is a professor of writing in the literature department at the University of California at San Diego, and the author of ten books of poetry.