PRAISE FOR MECHANICAL BULL:

Ament’s book is powerful with dangers lurking all through it, with not a clue to lull us into believing we just might not be this book’s next happy victim. DARA BARROIS/DIXON 

It isn’t easy to ride a mechanical bull. I lasted three seconds. It’s one of those things you think you’d be good at and when you try you realize it’s like everything else: you need to work at it. Rennie Ament’s first book, Mechanical Bull, revels in those feelings: the intoxicating confidence of fantasy, the punchy fuck-it, the (often funny) reality check, the subsequent humbleness, and the dust-yourself-off-and-do-it-again. SOMMER BROWNING

Blithely unhinged, Rennie Ament’s Mechanical Bull gathers its utterances together from strange and varied areas of knowledge, while maintaining the kind of eye contact that makes my nervous giggling give way to a silence in which I can’t help but see how the poems’ words align with the world I thought I knew. With casually excellent technique, Ament wriggles in and out of linguistic constraint, in contortions that leave my mind glistening with the residue of all that’s been touched: history, theology, horses, grief, beef jerky. What I am trying to say is this book is actually beautiful. You’ll feel it in your throat. HEATHER CHRISTLE

BIO:

RENNIE AMENT’s work has appeared in The Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, Sixth Finch, Colorado Review, West Branch, and other journals. A nominee for both the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, she has received support from Millay Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Center for Book Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Maine.