| Subject: Antidotes for an Alibi |
Author:
Amy King
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Date Posted: 10:03:54 10/23/04 Sat
I like the way the poems in Antidotes for an Alibi seem to turn on their axes. Their wit is gone before you know it, but the metaphysical effect transports you a considerable distance, where you find yourself happy to be pleasantly addled.
-Ron Padgett
Amy King's poems leap from small, fragile moments into grand gesture and godly vision. Her snapshots of downtown folklore connect on the most basic, truthful level. "If I were you, I would wait for me," King writes. I advise you to do what she says.
-Daniel Nester
At play in the displaced language of "elsewhere," the poems in Amy King's first book, Antidotes for an Alibi, offer a new kind of truth-telling: "I'm learning to give disappearance an honesty," she writes. "A patchwork seamstress" with "light's residue on my tongue," she "sing(s) along with the exacting world and its inner tin-heart difference." These poems are remarkable for their ironic wit, their bemused (and amusing) self-awareness, their fresh look at how we ab/use words, and are used by them.
-L. S. Asekoff
I admire Amy King’s poetry tremendously for the way it manipulates apparently plain language into thoughtful audacities. But her work is never in love with its own spiky cleverness. Quite the opposite: it is marked, even at its most pointed or witty, by an austere refusal to giggle at its own surprises. I first came to understand King’s poetry, quite appropriately, by the accident of seeing what the British call “English mosaic” on a lamppost at the northeast corner of Eighth Street and Broadway in Manhattan. “English mosaic” is what happens when someone willfully creative takes pieces of porcelain, china, earthenware – ordinary, rare, or irreplaceable – smashes them (that violence being essential to rebirth) and forces the pretty shards into new relations to one another. That lamppost seems the perfect tangible representation of King’s work, which takes up the tactile and moral world we perceive, holds it tenderly for a moment in a cherishing embrace – the better to dash it against a hard surface and rearrange the new fragments in strange, indelible ways. Reading King’s poems makes the eyes smart in every sense of the phrase: readers are compelled to see as possible juxtapositions they never would have envisioned on their own. “English mosaic” also describes the cool fun King has with plain nickel words, artfully reshuffled. Hers is not a surrealist’s art – she does not embrace chaos – but she does want to make readers feel that the comfortable rug and chairs they sit on have somehow grown ambulatory and are threatening to walk outside into the yard to sniff the air. Nothing is quite safe; nothing remains the same – deliciously so.
—Michael Steinman has written and edited six books, including The Happiness of Getting It Down Right and The Element of Lavishness, which was selected as a NYT Notable Book in 2001.
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Amy King grew up in Georgia and now spends much of her time in Brooklyn and Baltimore. She teaches English at Nassau Community College on Long Island and has been writing poems since the early 90’s. She received her MFA from Brooklyn College in 2000 and her MA from SUNY Buffalo in 1997. New work is forthcoming in Explosive Magazine, Milk Magazine, Near South and Unpleasant Event Schedule.
Antidotes for an Alibi is available through BlazeVOX [books] online at www.blazevox.org. Amy King may be reached through her website at www.amyking.org.
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