Amy Key

Our guest for the 20th. December meeting is Amy Key. The meeting is on Zoom and starts at 8.00 pm with an Open mic (one poem each, maximum 40 lines, ideally less) – seasonal themes particularly welcome, but not mandatory.

Amy grew up in Kent and the North East, and now works in London. She writes poetry, essays and non-fiction. Her debut poetry collection Luxe was published by Salt in November 2013. Her second collection Isn’t Forever was published by Bloodaxe in June 2018 and was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card choice. Her debut non-fiction book Arrangements in Blue will be published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in Spring 2023, alongside publication in the US (Liveright) and Italy (Rizzoli).

A strong influence on Amy has been Joni Mitchell, especially the album Blue: “I had always thought that in Blue Joni had taught me about love, about being in love and losing it. Now I think it’s more that Joni taught me about longing. About the gap between what you want and what you have, and what you have and what you had wanted.”

Some reviews praising Amy’s poetry:

‘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).

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)

‘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

Amy’s poems have been published in various magazines and anthologies including Poetry, The Poetry Review, Best British Poetry 2015, Love Poems (Faber & Faber) and The Poetry of Sex (Penguin).

She co-edited the online journal Poems in Which and an anthology of poems on friendship between women, Best Friends Forever, published by The Emma Press in 2014. In 2016 a pamphlet, History, was published by If A Leaf Falls Press.

We hope you can join us, with Amy, to celebrate the magic of poetry at our December meeting.