Friday, May 4, 2012


I first met Amy King in 2005, at the PCA/ACA conference in San Diego, where we participated in a poetry reading.  Since then, she has been all over the map--literal and figurative--publishing a number of books of complexly textured poems which echo various experimental traditions--bits of flarf, collage, lyric, all mashed and collided--but somehow sound inimitable.  Amy King's latest volume of poetry concludes with "An Opera of Peace"; how appropriate, how right, to have the lines of this polyphonic piece voiced by so many other poets:

to hear my hairs whisper
what you mean
to the secret awareness
of turning the news,
the political drudge
into words of oil on skin.
Now my signature aligns
with your bible,
I'm carrying the baby
wren beneath my tongue
in the hollow of my head
back to you....

No comments: