Rae Armantrout with Elizabeth Robinson

City Lights and The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State College celebrate the publication of "Safe Rooms "

City Lights and The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State College present

Rae Armantrout with Elizabeth Robinson

Rae Armantrout celebrates the publication of

Safe Rooms

published by Wesleyan University Press

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 is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Professor Emerita of Writing at UC San Diego. Her collection Versed won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Rae Armantrout’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, Poetry, The New Yorker, New American Writing, Lana Turner, Granta, several editions of Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She is professor emerita at UC San Diego and currently lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of 20 books, including Rendered Paradise (with Susanne Dyckman), Thirst & Surfeit, and Excursive. Her poetry has earned the National Poetry Series for Pure Descent and the Fence Modern Poets Prize for Apprehend, among other recognitions. Robinson has taught at the University of San Francisco, Naropa University, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is currently a senior pastor at Orinda Community Church in the Bay Area and teaches at Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop.

The Poetry Center, founded at San Francisco State College (now University) in 1954 by English professor Ruth Witt-Diamant, has been recording and archiving tapes of its public events for seven decades, one of the most significant public collections in the USA of original recorded performances by poets and related artists performing their work. In 1974, with poet Kathleen Fraser as director and with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Poetry Archives was established within The Poetry Center, to maintain the collection and provide public distribution. This collection, housed within the College of Liberal and Creative Arts, today holds over 4,000 hours of unique original audio and video master-recordings, 1954 to the present, an inestimable cultural asset. To learn more visit https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/poetrycenter/about

Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation