A Map Through the Mines of My Book
By Lissa Kiernan @ Arsenic Lobster [two excerpts]:
The book’s 60 poems, in savant-like methodical brilliance, are arranged in alpha-order and prefaced by a quote from Virginia Woolf’s cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando: “Everything, in fact, was something else.” This frames things perfectly, for to exist in King’s world for the duration of this book is to implicitly agree that 2 + 2 = mud, and Points A and B are hundreds of ants apart.
…
So what of this hip-swaggering, “masculine vein” poetry coming from a woman? King’s whip-smart, red-hot poetry is a turn-on, no matter which team you play for. Forget sex as subtext— here it’s unabashedly front and center, with titles like “SLIGHTLY PARTED THIGHS”, or these lines from “AND UT PICTURA POESIS CALLS HER NAME“: Interlocking legs twirl / Voices out of words. The smallest story of two people coming.
Just as seductive is the music woven, warp and weft, throughout King’s verse …
Read the whole stellar thing @ Arsenic Lobster!
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AMY KING View All →
Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award. Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She co-edited with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She also co-edits the anthology series, Bettering American Poetry, and is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
AMY KING 