Influences
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 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****
Amy King's poetry is carried by a vital and ineluctable complexity, yoking near-Elizabethan conceit to the roughest necessities with disarming sweetness. John Ashbery and Chidiock Tichborne could not have teamed up to do it better.
—Annie Finch****
