good books gone bad
Antidotes
for an Alibi (2005)
by Amy King
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Amy King's first full-length collection, Antidotes for
an Alibi, insists that we examine the deceptive clarity of our
actions and the goals that motivate us. How does one actually
get from "A" to "B”—and is there ever
really a “B”? What color is the white space between
“A” and “B”? Upon closer inspection, surface
realities reveal themselves to be porous and fragile, layered
with textures and grains that lead the eye on varying pathways.
So what are we to do in a world of newspaper narratives that instruct
us toward tidy endings, murmuring that such endings are possible
and even inevitable?
These poems greet us with leaking giraffes, dogs that lick lye,
the Lone Ranger, the inhabitants of Dishwater Island, an unmarried
wife and a Sikh cab driver, all acting within a familiar environment
of telephone messages, factory work, walks through woods, red
robins and hummingbirds, war zones and American histories. Both
the characters and their shifting frameworks combine and overlap
to point out the strangeness we tend to overlook for clarity's
sake. King wants us to reconsider the possibilities of current
events, to see that Truth is no longer a series of fixed notations
in black and white, but is a shape-shifting, multi-faceted chain
of perspectives. Her poetry celebrates the multiplicities that
sing within the surface of every object and action; she aims at
delectable surges, so that readers may touch and revel in the
uncertainties of a complex world in motion.
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.
___________________________
Also by Amy King
We
Are All Around Us
by Amy King
[ a free BlazeVOX ebook]
|
Amy King’s poems think in association,
evoking a world familiar but entirely unexpectable. Next to us
all this turns and spins: under the veil of hum and drum is the
paradise of possibility. This is a poetry of hope for a world
shrouded by nearly and almost.
-- Charles Bernstein
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
Product Information: Poetry
· Paperback: // pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound Binding
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] (September 2004)
· Size: 6.33" x 10.25"
· ISBN: 0-9759227-5-0
· Nice Price: $11.00
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it Now
See Amy's
new Book!!!
I'm The Man Who Loves You
Click HERE |
