I Want to Make You Safe

the long version

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "Amy King's poems seem to encompass all that we think of as the 'natural' world, i.e., sex, sun, love, rotting, hatching, dreaming, especially in the wonderful long poem 'This Opera of Peace.' She brings these abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living: 'Let the walls bear up the angle of the floor, / Let the mice be tragic for all that is caged, / Let time's contagion mar us / until spoken people lie as particles of wind'."—John Ashbery