The books we publish are often “difficult.” Some reviewers have the chops to deal with it. Others, not so much. We get lucky with Heather Seggel at Lambda Literary, who is willing to to tackle Amy King’s latest, The Missing Museum, a book that is precisely as difficult as, you know, the rest of life.
Here’s an excerpt:
In The Missing Museum, poet and Women’s National Book Association Award-winner Amy King balances passages that can prompt head-scratching wonder with a direct fusillade of shouty caps. The immediate and the inaccessible eye one another in the halls, exhibits of history both natural and not….
If this all sounds obscure and forbidding, at times it can be. 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.