At Big Bang Poetry, Mary McCray reviews Amy King’s The Missing Museum (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2016).
Here’s a snippet:
Once deep into the poems, they reminded me of poems by Jim Carroll due to their kind of gritty, skin-ripping quality. Or Henry Rollins. These poems are unkempt, full of street-intellectualizing that is delightfully pushy.
She had me in the prologue with “purveyors of knowledge, but too, your emotions are an intelligence.” Not only is this a defense of the emotional, I feel the entire set is writing about various intelligences: equations, indices, data, “math life,” points, beliefs and theories that aren’t adding up. In “Pussy Riot Rush Hour” “we incomplete ourselves.” In “Violent Blossoming Cities Ask How to Hear the Song” you can “centrifuge yourself.” These feel like riffs that solve for disruption.