One thing I sometimes find missing from post-avant poetry is a sense of intimacy. As the directly personal is (often) evaded, language/linguistic insights take the place of human insights; sharpness of thought is conveyed, rather than subtlety of feeling. We don’t get close to the poet, because he/she shows no desire to get close to us. Post-structuralism made “getting close” seem suspect; we’re used to regarding text as “just text” or “merely text”, rather than transparently revealing a constitutive subject. Amy King stands out from the post-avant pack, because she has achieved a very difficult feat in this book, Antidotes for an Alibi-- somehow, she has taken the conceptual assumptions of post-avant and humanized them, made them intimate. Her poetics foregrounds the human and the humane; yet her writing avoids overt attempts at transparency and is free of clichés. By threading together strains of Surrealism, Confessional poetry, and Lang-Po, King has created an original combination, which fulfills the requirements of conscious, post-avant textuality and also a perceived hunger for humanity. These poems are eclectic, electric, and not easily categorized. They burn with a strange and luminous intensity.
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