Amy King Poet, Editor, Curator, Educator

Author Biography

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

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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

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"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

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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

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Web Links

“Adult” Is Code for “Gay”?

April 13, 2009, 1:50 pm

A couple of months ago, Amazon quietly unleashed some sort of campaign to strip certain books of their sales rankings. Unfortunately (& not coincidentally), most of the books targeted fell under the “Gay/Lesbian” category. Once removed from the sales rankings and placed within the “Adult” category, these books no longer show up in search engines or in Amazon searches. In other words, sales death. How to kill gay books in one easy step? Watch while Amazon quietly removes gay and lesbian titles and renders them invisible. Censorship at its deadliest. Many good people have already been posting and protesting, and though you may not rely on big name middlemen for your goods, much of America does. Make it your business to send a word of protest Amazon’s way! A few excerpts follow.

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UPDATE – I just checked. I’M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU, my book of poems that has less sexual content than the abstinence-promoting, Twilight, has been relegated to the “Adult” category because I happened to have labeled it, myself, Gay and Lesbian. Go figure. It ain’t even erotic poetry,peeps!

From Mark Probst:

Yes, it is true. Amazon admits they are indeed stripping the sales ranking indicators for what they deem to be “adult” material. Of course they are being hypocritical because there is a multitude of “adult” literature out there that is still being ranked – Harold Robbins, Jackie Collins, come on! They are using categories THEY set up (gay and lesbian) to now target these books as somehow offensive.

From Catherine Lundoff:

There are less than 25 remaining GLBT and/or feminist bookstores left. Amazon.com and to a lesser extent, Barnes and Noble are the behemoths of bookselling, all bookselling in the U.S. This means that as with most industries that are transforming into monopolies, they get to control nearly all avenues of distribution as well as determining what you get to read and not read simply by making it disappear. If someone up the foodchain at Amazon decides that as of tomorrow, your uncle’s book on making dandelion salad does not deserve to appear in their search engine, then, hey it’s gone.

From Publishers Weekly:

Whatever the cause, titles like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain are among the those that have lost their sales ranking. Bloggers aren’t buying the glitch explanation, but the fact that such a wide range of titles have lost their rankings suggest that whatever Amazon may have been trying to do went haywire.