I Want to Make You Safe by Amy King

I Want to Make You Safe Reviews

• 
  Andrea Slot

  A bizarre, make-your-head spin kind of collection in the best way. I loved this book and have read and reread these poems. I would recommend that readers approach the book with an open mind and an open ear so that they can more easily enjoy the odd tangled music of the poems. The poems are not about meaning first and foremost -- they are there to make you rethink the way language and meaning is created. A lot of fun -- and a genius of a writer.
• 
  Sherry Chandler

  In the work of Amy King, I think I may have come up against the limit of my anti-narrative bent. In
  I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press, 2011), I encountered work that not only defies narrative, it defies the sentence itself.
  
  

  This last sentence could not have been
  the practitioners floating in my head,
  flowing into yours,
  my only eugenics,
  my only criss-cross,
  my only everything, except your match
  in the last whip and crack . . .
  
  a random pie far too gone,
  too eaten am I to be holding on
  to a product I conduct in the language of the fathers,
  “We are drunkishness, bric-a-brac, torn saddle, backlash.”
  (from “The Identity in My Crisis”)

  
  
  
  The language of the fathers is not to be trusted and the sentence dissolves into, if not non-sense, then non-logic.
  
  The first clue to this ambiguity may lie in the title itself: I Want to Make You Safe could mean I want to keep you safe, but it could also mean you are dangerous and I want to render you safe, as in, say, disarming a bomb. The identity of “you” is slippery.
  
  King is not, of course, the first poet to defy logic or the connective traditions of lyric poetry. The twentieth century saw the Surrealists, the L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poets, and the New York School as personified by John Ashbery (who blurbed King’s book). Even the High Modernists played at the game in a way we've currently come to accept as canonical.
  
  I have read in all these schools with a somewhat limited success in appreciating — not understanding — what they’re up to.
  
  In his
  blog for December 6, 2011, Jeffrey Levine said:
  
  

  The poet, like T.S. Eliot and all influenced thereafter, who would abolish the usual connectives of traditional verse, must make sure that those fragmentary images are sufficiently charged with, let’s call it “correspondence,” so that they hold the interest of the reader and fuse together into one imaginative whole.

  
  
  
  By this measure, the poems in I Want to Make You Safe didn’t work for me. I kept feeling that there were allusions and language games being played that I am too old, too Bible Belt, too rural to get. I felt a little like a Dickens character thrown into the middle of a Gertrude Stein piece.
  
  There is perhaps a little too much of Frost’s “satisfying vagueness” to be satisfying.
  
  Connections/correspondences are being made, however. When “The Strange Power of Lying to Yourself” ends
  
  

  we reach for the needle
  that will sew the coffin shut

  
  
  And a turn of the page reveals as poem entitled “Sewing the Coffin,” I feel as though I’m being battered over the head with connections. And yet I find them elusive – as I think they’re meant to be.
  
  Thumbs get a lot of play. The first section of the book is called “Fusion Is Not the Only Thumb,” and within it, “The World’s Babies” tells us
  
  
  

  
  A poem is a hat with no thumbs
  I wear upon my head, night’s cap of fool’s gold to harvest.

  
  
  The title poem “I Want to Make You Safe” begins with the line “Fusion is the only thumb.”
  
  Okay.
  
  There is even a poem entitled “Thank God You’re Connecting Things.”
  
  And then there are all the statements about language. This one from “Lidija Dimkovska Has Made a Bomb of my Eyes” is my favorite:
  
  
  
  

  “We all know the beyond words, before within, but do words know us?”
  Language speaks our very tender selves
  into birth but
  do words look human
  as silhouettes and know their creators, their creatures,
  call us ships and light lanterns, bang crosses, call stars or nail us
  to the bow and bow before us
  and cry to wish to love and touch us, our blooded sticky brows?

  
  
  
  
  Whoa! Ahab’s doubloon and Christ’s crown of thorns conflated. That delights Moby-Dick-loving me. Melville's novel is the wordiest of tomes, after all. And very playful with language.
  
  Okay, then, what about language? What about
  Auden and Garret’s statement that a poem is better heard than read?
  
  Ah!
  
  King’s poetry rhymes and chimes and puns and makes me think I try too hard to find a linear through-line. I just need to sit back and listen. The book is full of lines like this one from
  “The Marble Faun”
  
  
  
  

  From old Jewish towns we embrace
  the plotted demise and welcome a ghost
  in born-again tatters, being all that we know
  and the only face that matters. Except
  a child from the lawn who watches, in stone.

  
  
  
  
  I Want to Make You Safe is an angry book, a funny book, a book that's political at the level of metaphor, as in this passage from “I Hear Like Names Falling”
  
  
  

  
  We’ll swim the bowl of blackberries where
  our fingertips mistake each other
  for liquid and begin to drink the juice
  of everlasting youth,
  imported all the way from Guantanamo. Now go,
  revel in the lips of your country.

  
  
  I love the way Guantanamo comes crashing in there to pull me back out of that lovely swim in blackberry juice and into the world of waterboarding — even though I have no idea why I should associate Gitmo with everlasting youth. On an intuitive level, the line is very right.
  
  I Want to Make You Safe is an unsafe book, one that keeps you always a little off balance, that makes startling connections and that seems to promise connections that aren’t there. After all
  
  
  
  

  We are metered only by our own machines,
  while the book is a clock that forgets her mechanics.
  (from “Men by the Lips of Women”)

  
  
  
  
  So I didn’t solve the mystery or pin Amy King down to any kind of narrative through-line. The book pushed me waaay out of my comfort zone. But who ever grew by staying in the comfortable and familiar and who ever learned anything without striking out into unknown territory?
  
  I Want to Make You Safe was listed as a poetry bestseller by Small Press Distribution for
  November and
  December. The Boston Globe listed it as one of the
  Best Poetry Books of 2011, as did
  Coldfront.
  
• 
  Emma Bolden

  A really lovely book with some gorgeous linguistic fireworks. I see this as a series of meditations on the idea of keeping ourselves and others safe in personal and political relationships. There were a couple of places where the polysyllabic words just got a little too heavy for me, but this is definitely a good read, especially to see what's going on in contemporary poetry and poetics.
• 
  Dennis

  If you are going to survive anywhere, especially in Topeka, Kansas, you need to carry this on you at all times.
• 
  Colorado Review

  Read our review by Michael Flatt at
  http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/r...
• 
  Lissa Kiernan

  I went to sleep last night thinking about how I Want to Make You Safe, the title of Amy King’s latest collection, can be read two different ways: 1) the desire to protect someone from harm, or 2) the desire to render someone harmless.
  
  This morning, as I browse back through the collection, both of these readings stay with me—particularly in the middle section that shares the book’s title and especially in the head-spinning eleven-page poem that bears the name, too. The title poem unleashes a fury of nouns: from antibiotic-baked chicken to atomic bomb, barbed wire to bleating whip, hate to heart attack, torture to tumor. It ends on an image of a moon’s harp shaped / by my rib cage missing / its limbs, pleading: Please reattach the orifice if / I’m ever to hold your love.
  
  Following this wild read is a section titled “The Familiar,” which fulfills its promise with more readily accessible poems. But most of the works in this 38-poem, 87-page-strong collection concern themselves with defamiliarizing; the writer who coined that concept—Viktor Shklovsky—is even named in the fifth poem. After all, as King pens, again in the title poem: Proof is the poet’s burden / to tell but write beneath.
  
  Major themes, however, can be unpacked. The first poem “Some Pink in Your Color,” can be read as prologue, briefing us that a sudden awareness of mortality will play a leading role. These are poems suffused with, if not specifically about, the sense of vulnerability engendered by the failures of the body. And what do we want most when we begin to sense our end? Often it’s to ensure, post-us, that our loved ones and our legacy are left, respectively, in good hands and good order. Which leads to a third, less obvious, interpretation of the book’s title: the desire to make one’s legacy safe. As if to confirm this reading, King’s second poem begins: And suddenly, art is a hand planted from the wrist / down into the earth’s epidermis (“Follow the Leader of My Silken Teeth”).
  
  The desire to leave one’s house in good order—or in the poet’s case, to develop her art as fully as possible in the time alotted—is even more apparent in the midst of “Butterfly the Gnarled”: Parasites bed my inner lining— // A plural centipede burrows outbound, / crawls the spine of my hand / tells my pencil to move along, give out lead.
  
  Read my full review at The Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative:
  http://thecoop.drupalgardens.com/i-wa...
• 
  Michael

  A strange and delightful collection that I will most likely return to and find new, hidden meaning.
  
  The bizarre juxtapositions of image and musicality tended towards new readings of the themes involved. Making one safe can refer to, as has been mentioned, both the literal maternal affections one experiences as a caregiver and a rendering of a subject as safe in terms of stifled aggression.
  
  Amy's work could be described as hard to pin-down and that which is written with casual confidence.
  
  "But when did doorbells decease? You sound too alphabetical / shining amidst such lessons...in the retracting foot / steps, give them back and I'll / also make meals to oranges and apples / on tongues, chop down stalwart toad / stools to perch your fat furry ass upon. "
• 
  Paula Koneazny

  Poetry that I felt I should like, but which I just couldn't get into. Started & stopped this book several times. Finally plowed my way through to the end, but that's not saying much, since I don't think I took away anything from the experience. Which is not to say that King's poetry isn't good; it's just to say that it wasn't for me this time around. That said, I did like bits and pieces here and there. I just couldn't make the whole of it cohere for me.
  A gleaning of lines that caught my attention:
  "so many soldiers on the brink of their lives returning"
  "we rankle in the dunes and subject our thoughts/ to religion's aftermath"
  "This immersion has made me a model/ for your captivity digest"
  "Such went the days of wizened mass surprise"
  "In fact, the sky has stopped"
  "We shook hands in the language we meant/ to speak"
  "Now go,/ revel in the lips of your country"
  "they took the wrong ghost home"
  "We stand as weeds in motion"
  "Between blows, we'll mate."
  "We do, the big beautiful bees of us, pulling the veins in our wings,/ smoking light through antennae ends we're sure/ could reach another form of life when it comes/ down to us."
  "We seed through the hush, rising from earth,/ orchestras through flame."
  "We go/ to the flames of what stirs/ the breath from its regular/ motion"
  "I'm carrying a baby/ wren beneath my tongue/ in the hollow of my head/ back to you, you who/ are the heart of the awl/ and the climb on which/ I mount my last breath"
• 
  Raven

  I Want To Make You Feel Safe by Amy King for me is a five star read.
  
  This is the first book that I have read by this author and this is the first book I've read in a long time that I've emotionally connected with. This book can be enjoyed time and time again. It is amazingly intense and the author prepares you for the journey for you to take really well. The poems were beautifully structured and well thought out. This book was extremely well written. I will definitely want to one click future releases from this author.
  
  The author has a beautiful way with words and expresses them so eloquently. I really could not put it down. I must admit I really enjoyed reading it and I highly recommend it.
  
  My Favourite Quote from this was "I can't imagine the heart anymore now that it presses my ribs apart, a balloon of such gravity I ache for stars in a jar, wasps whose love reminds me of fireflies tonight". So beautiful, hard hitting words that truly express her emotion.
  
  The poems make you feel every emotion possible.
  
  Will definitely recommend to all friends and family
• 
  Maureen Alsop

  In the kingdom of Amy King’s I Want to Make You Safe, “we dance/ a music of paralysis petals/ that suspends the illusion of your feet…” King exposes the entry point, the space wherein barriers shift, where blockades in language create new dimensions and a reader is gently commanded to extend beyond blanched limitations of a glittering era toward the glitterati of a new millennium. Read full review at:
  http://www.poemeleon.org/maureen-also...
• 
  Dee Washington

  Yes found them We're gonna send at your house tomorrow730AM
• 
  John

  Amy King’s poems seem to encompass all that we think of as the “natural” world, i.e. sex, sun, love, rotting, hatching, dreaming, especially in the wonderful long poem “This Opera of Peace.” She brings these abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living: “Let the walls bear up the angle of the floor,/Let the mice be tragic for all that is caged,/Let time’s contagion mar us/until spoken people lie as particles of wind.
  
  — John Ashbery
• 
  Jawanza

  This book was very difficult for me to read. The author is clearly well-educated and clever, but her poems are not very accessible. They are made up of beautiful language, exquisite images, polished and sophisticated lines, but they just didn’t grab me or move me. I found my attention drifting in the middle of every poem I tried to read. That doesn’t happen when I read stronger poetry. I cannot recommend it.
• 
  h

  solid.