The Missing Museum
by Amy King

Co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize
A Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller

Poetry. 114 pages. Paperback. 2016.

Nothing that is complicated may ever be simplified, but rather catalogued, cherished, exposed. The Missing Museum spans art, physics & the spiritual, including poems that converse with the sublime and ethereal. They act through ekphrasis, apostrophe & alchemical conjuring. They amass, pile, and occasionally flatten as matter is beaten into text. Here is a kind of directory of the world as it rushes into extinction, in order to preserve and transform it at once.

The Missing Museum
by Amy King

Co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize
A Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller

Poetry. 114 pages. Paperback. 2016.

Nothing that is complicated may ever be simplified, but rather catalogued, cherished, exposed. The Missing Museum spans art, physics & the spiritual, including poems that converse with the sublime and ethereal. They act through ekphrasis, apostrophe & alchemical conjuring. They amass, pile, and occasionally flatten as matter is beaten into text. Here is a kind of directory of the world as it rushes into extinction, in order to preserve and transform it at once.

“Understanding” is not a part of the book’s project, but rather a condition that one must move through like a person hurriedly moving through a museum. (Publishers Weekly) Sometimes the thrill of reading poetry is the sense one minute that you understand the poet so clearly you’re not just seeing through her eyes but, perhaps more importantly, breathing through her lungs. (Lambda Literary) A visceral stunner … and an instruction manual…. King’s archival work testifies to the power—however obscured by the daily noise of our historical moment—of art, of the possibility for artists to legislate the world. (Kenyon Review) Remind[s] me of poems by Jim Carroll … or Henry Rollins. These poems are unkempt, full of street-intellectualizing that is delightfully pushy. (Big Bang Poetry)

“Understanding” is not a part of the book’s project, but rather a condition that one must move through like a person hurriedly moving through a museum. (Publishers Weekly) Sometimes the thrill of reading poetry is the sense one minute that you understand the poet so clearly you’re not just seeing through her eyes but, perhaps more importantly, breathing through her lungs. (Lambda Literary) A visceral stunner … and an instruction manual…. King’s archival work testifies to the power—however obscured by the daily noise of our historical moment—of art, of the possibility for artists to legislate the world. (Kenyon Review) Remind[s] me of poems by Jim Carroll … or Henry Rollins. These poems are unkempt, full of street-intellectualizing that is delightfully pushy. (Big Bang Poetry)

About the Author

Amy King is the author of the poetry collection, The Missing Museum, co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. King also joins the ranks of Ann Patchett, Eleanor Roosevelt & Rachel Carson as the recipient of the 2015 Women’s National Book Association Award. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is currently co-editing with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She is also co-editing the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.

About the Author

Amy King is the author of the poetry collection, The Missing Museum, co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. King also joins the ranks of Ann Patchett, Eleanor Roosevelt & Rachel Carson as the recipient of the 2015 Women’s National Book Association Award. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is currently co-editing with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She is also co-editing the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.