
Feb 18, 2014
1 Min read time
Share:
Poems on personal and political insecurity.
I Want To Make You Safe
by Amy King
Litmus Press, $15 (paper)
Amy King’s fourth collection of poems manifests something of Allen Ginsberg’s orphic lament and intimate yearning—personal appeals and political plaints fold together in rattling neologisms. King does not adopt a long line, but her language recalls Ginsberg’s verbal pyrotechnics: “My intestines clang with confectionary histories”; “this parcel world / on its wire waltz in brown paper creased?”; “one finger in a drone of cherubic phone calls”; “I am the gruntwork and a mystery of the gruntwork.” The oracular oratory in King’s book derives in part from the same place as Ginsberg’s: Walt Whitman. But hers is the voice of a postmodern Whitman in drag. The poems are performative, outspoken, and have an appropriative quality; they grab words, and attention, and you. These poems address both personal and political insecurity (there are references to the Department of Homeland Security and to homes with “locks that work / both ways”). The poems are predicated on a sense of danger that accompanies a desire to know. King wants to cast spells that make you secure, but—as Cassandra, or Eve, or Jocasta will tell you—knowledge never makes you safe. As a result King’s poetry can be admired but not always entered. Her bravado exposes the fact that the kind of safety afforded by the gruntwork and guesswork of making poems is a fragile, temporary sanctuary constructed out of an exquisite and often opaque linguistic architecture.
While we have you...
...we need your help. Confronting the many challenges of COVID-19—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. In Thinking in a Pandemic, we’ve organized the latest arguments from doctors and epidemiologists, philosophers and economists, legal scholars and historians, activists and citizens, as they think not just through this moment but beyond it. While much remains uncertain, Boston Review’s responsibility to public reason is sure. That’s why you’ll never see a paywall or ads. It also means that we rely on you, our readers, for support. If you like what you read here, pledge your contribution to keep it free for everyone by making a tax-deductible donation.
February 18, 2014
1 Min read time