Ms. Armantrout reads this afternoon to mark the paperback release of her tenth collection of poems, Next Life ($13.95 Wesleyan). The text of her remarkable poetry works like the filament in a light bulb – there’s illumination to be had. The reader is challenged to take a short jump from image to image, from thought to thought in order to reach “oh,” “aha.” The language is wiry and precise on the page, and her poems occupy a near vacuum-like emotional space – at times quite sad, other times quite comical, but the emotions come through at a slant, as though she speaks calmly and in profile. She can write an image with the best of them – “silence around / the sound of the saw,” for instance, with its perfectly measured alliteration and assonance. Her unique voice produces delightful, unexpected lines – “Sad, fat boy in pirate hat. / Long, old, dented, / copper-colored Ford. // How many traits / must a thing have / in order to be singular?”