I Want to Make You Safe

I Want to Make You Safe by King, Amy. Paperback edition. ISBN: 9781933959238.

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "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: Let the walls bear up the angle of the floor, / Let the mice be tragic for all that is caged, / Let times contagion mar us / until spoken people lie as particles of wind."--John Ashbery "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 "I love Amy Kings smile in photos of Amy King, Amy Kings exuberance and looping, bashing panache (flamboyant manner, reckless courage) in the poems of Amy King, Im going to say Amy King every chance I get in this blurb to make you think I gotta read me some Amy King, especially if youre looking for anything/that will pull the cork, boil the blood/of displeasure, as only the poems of Amy King can in the world in which Amy King is King (and Queen)."--Bob Hicok "The first poem I read by Amy King was Men By The Lips of Women and it struck me with a force I had previously felt on encountering masterworks by Lorca and Dylan Thomas. I wont live long enough to see if her poetry will continue to equal the magnificence of theirs, but the fact that she achieved it once (at least) proves to me it could."--Bill Knott