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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