BOOKS

BOOKS

• THE MISSING MUSEUM, Co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize
• I WANT TO MAKE YOU SAFE
• I’M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU
• SLAVES TO DO THESE THINGS
• ANTIDOTES FOR AN ALIBI
• THE PEOPLE INSTRUMENTS

The first poem I read by Amy King was “MEN BY THE LIPS OF WOMEN” and it struck me with a force I had previously felt on encountering masterworks by Lorca and Dylan Thomas. I won’t live long enough to see if her poetry will continue to equal the magnificence of theirs, but the fact that she achieved it once (at least) proves to me it could. —Bill Knott

 

“I’m portable. My mind travels the verse and valleys of whole people,” says the poet. Correct! Readers of this book will discover their own memories. They will melt in them, amazed. lullabied, dramatized, shocked that they exist. Amy King is a true bard. —Tomaz Salamun

 

Amy King’s poems seem to encompass all that we think of as the “natural” world, i.e. sex, sun, love, rotting, hatching, dreaming, especially in the wonderful long poem “This Opera of Peace.” She brings these abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living: “Let the walls bear up the angle of the floor,/Let the mice be tragic for all that is caged,/Let time’s contagion mar us/until spoken people lie as particles of wind.” —John Ashbery

“Rarely have the nude and the cooked been so neatly joined” as in Amy King’s I Want to Make You Safe. If “us,” “herons,” and “dust” rhyme, then these poems rhyme. If that makes you feel safe, it shouldn’t. Amy King’s poems are exuberant, strange, and a bit grotesque. They’re spring-loaded and ready for trouble. Categories collapse. These are the new “thunderstorms with Barbie roots.” —Rae Armantrout

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Smoke n’ hott, these poems emerge as … audible diamonds that cut, where Rock is King & candor disarms paranoia. or, in King’s case, downright dismembers it: Forgive me, I am the final/ seminary soul to check your shape/in the dress of that embalming line, Passengered adeptly under the influence of Lorea, Neruda maybe, (Buried by midnight/ I am a Warm/fly in amber.) the reader wants to shout, GO DUENDE!!! —Jeni Olin

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Vulnerability, fragility, and anxiety are all flushed out into the open here and addressed with such strong sound and rhythm that we recognize a resilient, defiant strength within them. King puts relentless pressure on forces seemingly beyond our reach and, in bringing them closer, exposes their own vulnerable centers. This is a poetry equally committed to language as a tool with social obligations and language as an art material obligated to reveal its own beauty. King’s language does both magnificently. —Cole Swensen

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I love Amy King’s smile in photos of Amy King, Amy King’s exuberance and looping, bashing panache (flamboyant manner, reckless courage) in the poems of Amy King, I’m going to say Amy King every chance I get in this blurb to make you think “I gotta read me some Amy King,” especially if you’re “looking for anything/that will pull the cork, boil the blood/of displeasure,” as only the poems of Amy King can in the world in which Amy King is King (and Queen). —Bob Hicok