At Kenyon Review, editor Janet McAdams discusses Amy King’s The Missing Museum (TS Press 2016).
Some fave excerpts:
I’m always a little suspicious of poetry collections that open with a prelude poem but the “Prologue” of Amy King’s The Missing Museum is both a visceral stunner in its own right and an instruction manual to the collection that follows. Throughout the volume, the instructee of her “Wake Before Dawn & Salt the Sea” is always at hand, conflated not merely or simply with the reader, but with that reader’s self that wants to turn away, to eschew a vivid and lived encounter with the significant actual. The subtle rhyme that closes an otherwise unrhymed poem suggests also that these instructions are to the poet herself primarily, even as they too instruct the reader: “Be somebody, be one who wrestles and makes love to the dark / that is your deepest part, the uselessness of love and art.” …
Reading King’s new collection, I was mindful, too, of the title’s promise, the story of a museum that collects the missing, and of a museum that is missing. Ultimately, though, these are not poems of grief or loss. The “uselessness of love and art” is a phrase continually belied by the poems in this collection, and 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.