Amy King is the author of Slaves to Do These Things, I'm the Man Who Loves You, and Antidotes for an Alibi, all from BlazeVOX Books, and The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award). She is currently preparing a book of interviews with the poet Ron Padgett, and co-edits Esque Magazine with Ana Bozicevic. She teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College and, with Ana Bozicevic, curates the Brooklyn Based reading series The Stain of Poetry. Her poems have been nominated for numerous Pushcart Prizes, she was a Lambda Literary finalist, and she was the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship for Poetry.
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"'Rarely have the nude and the cooked been so neatly joined' as in Amy Kings I Want to Make You Safe. If 'us,' 'herons,' and 'dust' rhyme, then these poems rhyme. If that makes you feel safe, it shouldnt. Amy Kings poems are exuberant, strange, and a bit grotesque. Theyre spring-loaded and ready for trouble. Categories collapse. These are the new 'thunderstorms with Barbie roots.'"
Rae Armantrout
"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. Kings language does both magnificently."
Cole Swensen
"Amy Kings 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."
John Ashbery
Litmus Press