Customer Reviews

Slaves to Do These Things

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"The poems behind King's titles deliver, betraying their promise of hip bombast, the kind of clarity that only a puzzle thrown in the air can attain. ... From poem one, in which the I's bosom suckles "the world's new adults," the populist poet accomplishes what Baudelaire's immortal Beauty, that classicist goth femme, cannot: she accepts her characters into her body, and allows herself to be populated. The flâneuse rolls up her sleeves and joins the chain gang. This is the kind of ego-nixing, egalitarian authorship Baudelaire and Poe were both pleasantly sickened to envision: King is the (wo)man of the crowd. ... So the inclusiveness and porousness of King's lovemaking with her country heightens with her each new book, and one wonders with whetted appetite which state her troupe will next elect to pitch its tent in, and play its selves out."

Amy King is a poet's poet, highly respected in the contemporary world
of letters. Her latest collection of poems reveals why.

Mistress of a mythic surrealism that is laced at times with bawdy
language, Amy combines images like "moldy dark stools in back room
encounters" with "Michaelangelo turning crosshairs to sunshine."
Unusual juxtapositions like these compel the reader to turn the page,
discover more. Divided into five acts, this collection of poetry arcs
like a prize-winning drama, a volume that should be in everyone's
hands and on everyone's shelf!

--The Tower Journal

Amy King's writing are at once brainy yet coursing with a perceptible sensuality, are among the best of the post-modernist, post-Language, post-confessional style where we have. She is a writer who has surmounted the collective, generation- situated surprise that our native tongue is , in essence, slippery when it comes to addressing our experience and who has gotten on with an interrogation of both the templates one has absorbed from birth and the ones accrued through living long enough to modify one's narrative.

There is no defeatism here, no smallish voice sighing over disappointments , no staccato -cadenced anger replaying old wounds. Amy King comes through these poems not as a survivor nor someone inclined to obscure the bare facts of her life and the reading she brought with her, but rather a poet with a firm grip on the co-agitations of joy and subtler anguish.

The wonder is that there not a place one senses that they've come across someone who thinks it's time to address themselves in a disguised past tense; these are the wonderings, inspections, musings of some one too enthralled with the discussion underway to worry what the final word will be. What hasn't been said yet is nothing to worry about, but to anticipate as a hard-verbed , sexily ironic entree to what one doesn't already know.

King's verse is sharp, witty, moving in ways that are made powerful by the emotional nuance her line breaks contain; there is the sense that everything one knew is wrong, after all, and yet it stands as a reasonably reliable filter through which one may continue their negotiation with the metaphysically inclined whispers--the ghostly reminders objects, places, faces can awake and send a chill down your spine. There is an analytical rigor here, but not cerebralization of one's history. One witnesses the sort of appreciation of personal multi-valence; the meaning of King's life has changed due to the texts she's absorbed, and her experience, in turn, has changed the meanings of the books she has been given.