Amy King

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "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

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.

"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.

Poetry. Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award Series Winner of the 2001-02 Chapbook Award. Her first published collection.