Illinois Authors

Persea 2023

An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Happiness and Unhappiness catalogs our daily disappointments and our nighty dreams of perfection. Entry by entry, in poems that shift under the weight of their formal properties, Amy Newman describes a physical world stuffed with maddening beauty, trifling joys, and the sense that all of it might come to nothing, but what a spectacular nothing that is. These poems narrate the comings and goings in the natural world where animals and people move silently, warily, some by instinct, others by faith, all of us burdened yet somehow redeemed by the perfect imperfections around us. Unfinished, Newman’s encyclopedia hasn’t yet exhausted the knowledge of existing in a world that’s both violent and beautiful. Yet it continues to try.

Alice James Books, Farmington, Me. : ©1999.

Camera Lyrica navigates the intersection between realism and naturalism, locating moment by moment--the only way it can--the artful, necessary, and always mysterious transformation that occurs between the perceiver and perceived. Amy Newman's subjects range from Audubon's drive for precision, Michelangelo's unfinished Pietá, Darwin and forty-year old Barbie, to a meditation on the diversity of Type itself. With grace and dexterity, her intelligent eye dips into Catholic Mysteries, and the quiet but momentous domesticity of a backyard quince tree. Hers is a language both lush and spare, as she filters it and the world through a lucid imagination, transforming both into something beautiful, challenging, and wholly new.

Persea Books, New York : ©2011.

Each prose poem in this extraordinary volume is an impassioned letter to a nameless editor from a poet seeking publication for her collection about chess, sainthood, and the poet's lonely childhood. Taken individually, the poems display a dazzling originality; together, they form an exquisite exploration of memory and longing.

Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT : 2004.

In her newest feat of poetic innovation, Amy Newman wanders the lives of mid-century poetry immortals, including Berryman, Bishop, Lowell, Plath, and Sexton, peeking in from the periphery on personal moments both sensational and mundane, imagining their consequences for the poets, their readers, and their shared American century. Affecting and refreshing, a perfect mix of literariness and pulp, On this Day in Poetry History is the latest accomplishment from a poet of incomparable wit and imagination.

Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Cleveland : ©1995.