Amy King
Antidotes for an Alibi
BlazeVox Books
ISBN 0-9759227-5-0
2005

These poems read to me like poetry versions of flash fiction. Now, I like flash fiction very much, but I like the more fabulistic kind. Amy King is writing the fabulistic kind of flash fiction -- I want to say, "the good kind" -- in poetry. What does this mean? Well, when lineated, the line breaks in the poems point to the jumps in the narrative. When not, the poems still take the same little leaps that poems take. I guess I'm struggling with the new sentence this morning. I am not seeing "torsion" as I understand it, nor am I looking for it -- I am just saying that these poems have little leaps in them that flash fiction of a similar type does not. For example, this poem, "Evening In," is a story of screening a particular kind of call:

Evening In

Mother phoned the premature death of father to me. A machine shuffled her words. I played back the story of my childhood and grieved.

Now, I would probably end the stanza here, or title it something different. In any case, the evening in begins with a message in a machine. I would think flash fiction might use "the machine" and not jump so quickly to "story of my childhood."

After dinner, blocks of toddler teak wood fell, then floated, mistaken for cork. Household acts boiled over Aunt Max