Take Us Quietly

In Take Us Quietly, Tammy Armstrong displays an unusual virtuosity. Her poems team with visceral, sharp-edged images, whether cracking open the rough shell of rural childhood or the accommodations of love in a long-term relationship. With language more astonishing than ever, Armstrong writes with both torque and tension as her poems leap from thought to thought, from one emotional tone to another. By turns nightmarish, erotic, and full of delight, Take Us Quietly exposes the mind's deepest truths, drilling through the surface tension of the present into the artesian well of memory.