BRENT ARMENDINGER reads from his new book of poetry THE GHOST IN US WAS MULTIPLYING, together with CLAUDIA RANKINE

The Ghost In Us Was Multiplying (Noemi Press)

Where does one body end and another begin? In The Ghost in Us Was Mul­tiplying, Brent Armendinger explores the relationship between ethics and queer desire, infusing meditations on public life and politics with a radical sense of intimacy. Although grounded in lyric, these poems are ever mindful of how language falls apart in us and – perhaps more im­portantly – how we fall apart in language. Armendinger asks, “What ra­tio of news and light should a poem deliver?” This book is a continuous reckoning with that question and the ways that we inhabit each other.

Praise for The Ghost In Us Was Multiplying:

To “multiply.” To “ devote.” To “ferment inside a hush.” Brent Armendinger writes through and from the body, recollected [contravened] at all turns by the ferocity of its accompanying landscapes, affinities and the heart itself. “How else can I survive?” writes the poet, deep inside a book that traces the index of an intense need: the kind of contact that can’t be assuaged by touch alone. I was so interested in this other, longitudinal and “surpassing” touch that happened again and again in a book both measured and dreamed: the “pictogram,” for example, that’s heard rather than seen; the blood that’s mailed “back north”-- a “stain, my zero.” What does it mean to encounter a zero -- a “stranger”-- that doesn’t diminish in repetition, but which strengthens, glitters, hurts to look at directly or feel? Brent Armendinger writes into this quality or “crucial” space with an emotional and soulful approach to the “amniotic” potential of vocabu­laries, human and otherwise. “What do the birds think?” I loved this book so much, for what it senses into as much as it expresses: a longing for radical company; studies of water and cosmic flows of all kinds. “Where will you live now,” asks the poet, “and can you hear it,/the way your voice has changed?” Brent Armendinger is a rare experimental writer who writes deeply and passion­ately from the soul. I am extremely honored to write in support of his poetry. --Bhanu Kapil, author of Ban en Banlieue

The poems in Brent Armendinger’s The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying are hushed, as if spoken the morning after a heavy snow. They are also admirably attentive to sadness, breath, and desire. Their speaker laments being “too permeable,” but it’s precisely that translucence that matters here: it makes audible the mu­sic of his “almost way of touching,” as well as delivering the sometimes mel­ancholy, perennially essential sound of “how the heart opening always feels.
—Maggie Nelson, author of The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

Brent Armendinger was born in Warsaw, New York, and studied at Bard College and the University of Michigan. In addition to The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying, Armendinger has published two chapbooks, Undetectable and Archipelago. His work has appeared in many journals, including Aufgabe, Bateau, Bloom, Bombay Gin, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, LIT, Puerto del Sol, RECAPS Magazine, Volt, and Web Conjunctions. In 2013, Armendinger was awarded a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Pitzer College, where he is an Associate Professor of English and World Literature.

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, and the plays, Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, commissioned by the Foundry Theatre and Existing Conditions (co-authored with Casey Llewellyn). Rankine is co-editor of American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century series with Wesleyan University Press andThe Racial Imaginary with Fence Books. A recipient of awards and fellowships from  The Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Lannan Foundation,  Poets and Writers and the National Endowments for the Arts, she teaches at Pomona College.