Isn't Forever

By Amy Key

Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. Amy Key’s Isn’t Forever is a grimoire for feminine selfhood in a world where a sense of self is flimsy, elusive and unrequited. The poems in this book are obsessive in their desire to construct and breach the terms of their own intimacy. They have their own ‘narrative costume’ but are vexed with it, not quite able to master the ‘diligence of having a body’. This is a book where a tender and sabotaging shame of aloneness has taken root. Where wants cluster and are at war with each other. Where the heart is at once ‘all lurgy’ and an investment piece to be saved for best. Where the sea is the only solace, but the sea is blasé. The ‘ta-dah!’ and candour of these poems is an exercise in Amy Key’s imaginative protection and urge for personal extravaganza, an attempt to acknowledge but fight back the brutal inner voice. The obscure audience of the reader is never out of sight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Jun 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781780371740

Amy Key

Amy Key’s second poetry collection, Isn’t Forever, a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice, was published by Bloodaxe in June 2018 and was named a book of the year in the Guardian, The Times and the Irish Times. Her poems have been widely published in magazines including Granta, The White Review, Poetry, The Poetry Review, Poetry London and Broadly, and in anthologies f rom Faber & Faber, Penguin and Ignota Books. She is currently writing a hybrid work of creative non-fiction and poetry.

Book preview

AMY KEY

ISN’T FOREVER

Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice

Amy Key’s Isn’t Forever is a grimoire for feminine selfhood in a world where a sense of self is flimsy, elusive and unrequited. The poems in this book are obsessive in their desire to construct and breach the terms of their own intimacy. They have their own ‘narrative costume’ but are vexed with it, not quite able to master the ‘diligence of having a body’. This is a book where a tender and sabotaging shame of aloneness has taken root. Where wants cluster and are at war with each other. Where the heart is at once ‘all lurgy’ and an investment piece to be saved for best. Where the sea is the only solace, but the sea is blasé.

The ‘ta-dah!’ and candour of these poems is an exercise in Amy Key’s imaginative protection and urge for personal extravaganza, an attempt to acknowledge but fight back the brutal inner voice. The obscure audience of the reader is never out of sight.

‘The work of Amy Key can be described as magical, hallucinatory, erotic, lush with texture and hot with weird emotion. Smart and strange, it attaches to you audaciously and doesn’t let you go. Like a fine poetry wine, I find notes of Matthea Harvey, Emily Dickinson, Mary Szybist. Yet I am always surprised, line by line, at how recognisable her style is, how unlike anything else it is.’ – Brenda Shaughnessy

‘Amy Key’s Isn’t Forever is a book of love: love for both the pure carcass of experience and the unreality of imagined things. The poems set out from moments of desire and squander themselves in the act of making something seemingly unusable which actually alters, gently but authoritatively, our conception of utility. If I built aeroplanes, she tells us, I would begin by making one that was too beautiful.’ – Oli Hazzard

Cover painting: The Historian (2015) by Caitlin Keogh

(Acrylic on canvas, 198 x 165 cm. Courtesy of the artist & Bortolami, New York)

AMY KEY

Isn’t Forever

CONTENTS

Title Page

I

Lousy with unfuckedness, I dream

I do not need the sea to love me back

Announcement and next steps

I wish I had invented the woman

Haunted

How to be sexy

To dream of copper denotes oppression from those above you in station

Two cats

Oh you most beautiful inside of a vegetable!

II

Delphine is on silent retreat

Stem of wallflower / Hair of doormat

Gentle spectrum

Violet-Among-the-Harpsichord

Small pebbles

Three summers

She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to