Poetry. "Amy King's mercurial poems capture the instability of cultural, sexual, and poetic identity. In the circuitry of her illuminated, incongruous, but somehow perfectly apt details, 'the alien befits us.' With a nod to Gertrude Stein and Fernando Pessoa, as well as cameos by Frida Kahlo, Maya Deren, and Claude Cahun, Amy celebrates 'the roles' of women even as she redefines them, telling us: 'I put on my long black dream/to live among my female brothers.' Playful, provocative, and frenetically lyrical, this is metamorphic poetry for our times--Elaine Equi. "'We are not / a great many things, while in fact we are the functions / of those things, and without them, / we are less and more than ever.' You see, there's an underbelly that needs to be got to, and I'M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU is all about it. Each detail in an Amy King poem seems a world in itself. & it's not like you've never seen details like these. & it's not like you have either"--Rod Smith.
Amy King, born in Baltimore, MD & currently living in NY, founded and curated, through 2010, the Stain of Poetry Reading Series in Brooklyn, NY. She also teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College and holds an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College, where she was the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship for Poetry, and an MA in Poetics from SUNY Buffalo. Many of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and she was the 2007 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere.
King also co-edits Poets for Living Waters with Heidi Lynn Staples and Esque Magazine with Ana Bozicevic. She organizes The Count and interviews for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, edits the Poetics List, sponsored by The Electronic Poetry Center (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania), moderates the Women's Poetry Listserv (WOMPO) and the Goodreads Poetry! Group.
She is the author of Antidotes for an Alibi (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist), I'm the Man Who Loves You, and, most recently, Slaves to Do These Things, all three from Blazevox Books, as well as a number of poetry chapbooks. A new book, I Want to Make You Safe, is forthcoming from Litmus Press. Currently, she is preparing a book of interviews with the poet Ron Padgett.
