Isn't Forever - Softcover

Amy Key

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780371713 ISBN 13: 9781780371719

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2018

Synopsis

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. The poems 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.

Amy Key's first collection Luxe was published by Salt in 2013. Isn't Forever is her second book-length collection and was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice for Summer 2018

About this title

Review

'Amy Key does for verse what Phoebe Waller-Bridge, writer of Fleabag, is doing for television, wrenching laughter of shock and recognition from line after line.' - Susannah Herbert, The Observer<

'As for poetry, I fell hard for Amy Key's Isn't Forever, a gorgeous, sad box of delights about intimacy, bad bodies, sorrow... Key is adept at linguistic surprises, charting women's lives with a savage delicacy.' - Olivia Laing, The Guardian (Best Books of 2018)

'Her new collection, Isn't Forever, is playful, surreal and enchanting but also rooted in brutal emotional honesty. She is writer of a rare and strange magic.' --Sarah Perry, The Guardian (Best Summer Books 2018)

Ms Key's poetry is sublime. Read this to lose yourself in another person's worldview entirely. Hypnotic with a cutting, witty edge, these poems invite you into a hall of mirrors reflecting everything about the self - from sex, to love, to death. Despite this, they are not alienating, but rather draw you closer and closer to understanding an inner transcendent human truth. --Max Wallis, Mr Porter (Best Summer Books)

'Isn't Forever is a PBS Wild Card Choice. Sad and sunny, tightlaced and funny, you have to like Amy Key's poems.' - Claire Crowther, The Poetry Review

'This utterly original book asks what it means to inhabit a female body, while serving as tribute - through form and message - to women of the past and present. Exploring femininity, felinity, trauma, beauty and loss, these intensely musical poems have unforgettable lines that will echo in your head like a favourite song.' --Kathryn Maris

Review

I’m truly bewitched by Amy Key's poems. They cut right to the quick of what means to be a modern girl. Honestly, they make me feel dizzy. They’re like beautiful rooms I want to lie down in; they are perpetually surprising, ferocious and unruly. They’re brave and splendid, extravagant and precise. They track difficult emotional states of longing and desire, hatred, fear and self-disgust, and yet they are also witty, playful, luxuriant and intensely concerned with joy. Ugh, just buy them. – Olivia Laing

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1780371713
• ISBN 13: 9781780371719
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 64