on amy king's poems and chapbook The People Instruments

I like Amy King's poems... a "whistle captured within" the "cut glass" of the narrative ("A Betting Person".) . . .Her poems are of that Post-Ashberyian flavor of "experimental" poetry that can be found both infiltrating more bored contemporary works or buddying up to its wilder cousins in the likes of sidereality. As narratives, the poems enter "the parasitical world" where guests wear a "napkin of murdered surprise", a dinner party with "the smell of tongues cut/mid-sentence", and other such re-cast venues where imagery meets abstraction in shades of "easy blue" ("Wooden Cuckoo".) They are often humorously surrealistic, full of post-industrial objects such as "lifelike finger explosives" replacing the sentimental "plush velvet items" of the past. ("Homage to the Ballad".)

Kings’ poetry is thick with rich imagery; in her worlds, gnats move "bulbously" and the night sky is divided into layers of syrup. Familiar symbols or phrases are re-awakened including"the seventh wonder of your bony perfume" and the stone pulled from the sword. A humorous cynicism often lurks beneath her words, when she says, "you can compose another /someone and report every arm swing/or coffeed persuasion for bite-stepping oscillation/routines," illustrating in her own objective list the automatic, robotic way human life can be boxed into "oscillation routines", and its communications will be "filed" among "the most common transmissions" ("On Transferring Bodies".) The common theme of "remains" exists; the people that populate Amy Kings’ poems often do naught but "remiain on the planet/ together", trapped by chance like the revolution "wrapped in paper" and sitting on the mantle.

Regarding the chapbook,

Amy King
The People Instruments
2001-02 winner of Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award
40 pages
ISBN 1-886350-56-6
$6 postage-paid direct from publisher

In my opinion, The People Instruments contains some of Amy King's best work available. She uses her command of the personal tone as one of the chapbook's greatest strenghts, warning or whispering to the reader, "I sit secretly among you/in biblical proportions loving/throws out my net," ("Wide Open Stakes.") The poems begin with challenges that intrigue the reader, "Please do not comprehend what's missing," she asks, "but if you should, emit your trajectory/face forward without apologies" ("Aftershock".) The People Instruments contains some of the most artfully crafted scenes, and the poems are tidy and without loose ends.

The poetry and the chapbook considered, I do have a few criticisms to offer. First of all, with Amy herself as the apparent first person narrator in most of the poems, the narrator sometimes feels slightly out of reach, stating her feelings at the expense of the image. The reader often functions as the fly-on-the wall to Amy’s revelations and subject-less demands, such as "I want early. I want easy" ("Itinerary Replete".) I was also slightly frustrated by the poems’ use of abstractions ("punctured emphasis" and "solvent risk") and difficult words.

Amy King has been a surprising and challenging read for me and I am pleased that I have had so much material to read and enjoy. If you have managed to read this far, do buy her chapbook and read the poems on her site