Winner of the 2025 Iowa Poetry Prize

“Ament’s poetry reveals what pulses under our certainties—the voice is plain and fancy, the address full of yearning yet powerfully okay with what is, right here (lemon, penny, baby, cat) with one eye ever on what is intolerable and adjacent (cruelty, death, void, denial). This work is deeply rooted in careful moral thinking and ontological query, but grows wild, needing no distancing language to scaffold meaning. These poems skillfully stack and slide the most pressing questions (without answers), fragments stand as statements, and plain statements of self split off into parts. What is known finds its edges against some wise unknown that Ament has invented, spinning it for us. Reading Full-Time Mammal, I feel, impossibly, in the company of Rumi, Ikkyū, Andrea Gibson, Alice Notley, and Fanny Howe—for here is a poet continuing their holy quest(s): to find significance and connection in the smallest piece of shattered, scattered subjectivity, to hold it out to a reader of this moment, which is forever, in Ament’s hand. I feel held, and guided, and possessed of what the great mystery poetry reveals. It’s so full of the surprises of being alive!”

— Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

“To all full-time mammals who can read this blurb, Rennie Ament has created a masterpiece out of studying the crawling and walking world. ‘First, / in order to live, I had to divide / and divide.’ This book is a brilliant collection of poems that addresses the critical questions of how and why we are busy being alive.”

— CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration, While Standing in Line for Death, Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, and The Book of Frank.

Coming 4/30/2026: preorder from the University of Iowa Press

Blithely unhinged, 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. It’s fun and also frightening, like the old joke—What goes ha ha bonk?—about a man laughing his head off. 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, author of Paper Crown, The Crying Book, Heliopause, What Is Amazing, The Trees The Trees

It isn’t easy to ride a mechanical bull. I lasted three seconds. It’s one of those things you think you’d be miraculously good at and when you try you realize it’s like everything else: you need to work at it. Rennie Ament’s 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. But it's not that linear; Mechanical Bull is all of it all at once. Linear thinking is a dead-end “pilfered by sons of important men/who became important men/who made sons.” Ament’s rebellious, joyous consciousness points out the places of solace and freedom: “the genre-/less bells never rest, they knell/senseless, free referents.” 

— Sommer Browning, author of Good Actors, Backup Singers, Either Way I’m Celebrating

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