Photo: Selfie by Amy King.
The Public Poetry Reading Series presents New York-based poet, Amy King, on Saturday, December 6, at 2pm at Houston Public Library’s Central Library. Three other Texas poets will also be featured at the reading: Michael D. Snediker, Regina Vigil and Chris Wise.
Amy King’s collection, “I Want to Make You Safe,” was named one of Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2011. Of that collection, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, John Ashbery, offered this praise: “Amy King’s poems seem to encompass all that we think of as the ‘natural’ world, i.e., sex, sun, love, rotting, hatching, dreaming … She brings these abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.” Amy King teaches Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College and works with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.
Houston Public Media’s Catherine Lu chatted with Amy King, who believes that poetry should jostle us and “cause us to think in uncomfortably fresh fashion.” She shared her poem, “Wings of Desire,” and offered “Understanding the Poem” as additional reading.