WE TRAVEL TOWARDS IT
Available from Serving House Press
Praise for We Travel Towards It
"Beginning from "the instant...the oak fell," destroying the poet-speaker's house on top of her, We Travel Towards It embarks on an awakening born of ruin at once personal and collective-the tree's fall a consequence of climate change-intensified storms. Pence digs into memory, uprooting personal as well as societal traumas of gendered and environmental violence born of desire's "endless pursuit, grasping at what / was never ours." In these unsettling, empowering poems, Pence insists on the necessity of remembering not only "inviolable wonder" but "what is frail / what is brutal / what pearls under the feet." Truth-seeking and transformative, the poems of We Travel Towards It are as gorgeous as they are devastating."
-Sandra Meek, Author of Still and Ecology of Elsewhere
In the aftermath of personal disaster-a storm-felled tree that cleaved a house and a life in two-Amy Pence writes, "It was good to fill the sinkhole myself." Both metaphor and fact, the "storied canopies" of the fallen tree and the gap left in its place provide an opening to probe past losses, beauties, and griefs. We Travel Towards It moves deftly between the personal and the public, from the cleaving of childbirth to the anonymous intimacies of strangers sharing hotels after the ever-intensifying natural disasters on the planet we all call home. Surprising and urgent in the face of climate catastrophe, this is a remarkable collection.
-Chelsea Rathburn, Author of Still Life with Mother and Knife and Poet Laureate of Georgia
Pence performs not an imitation of Dickinson, but an inhabitation of her. ~Katharine Coldiron, The Bind
Pence creates a poetics of trauma and redemption, an aesthetic predicated on building narrative, and discovering meaning, ‘by degrees.’ In doing so, Pence shows us that as T.S. Eliot later argues, quite famously, the past is contained within the present. Here, history and modernity are conflated in even the texture of the language itself. By pairing words like “opon” with more colloquial speech, Pence shows us that history, its trauma, its silences, and its elisions are embedded within the minutia of syntax and grammar.
~~Kristina Marie Darling - Green Mountains Review
Armor, Amour
Ninebark Press, 2012
Available from the author
Amy Pence’s second collection, Armor, Amour, is made up of energetic, formally varied poems that explore a wide range of subjects—sexual desire, contemporary urban landscape, art and mythology, the natural world
~~Melissa Ginsburg, Colorado Review
The Decadent Lovely
Available from Mainstreet Rag 2010
"Through the acquisition of archetypal guardians, conversations with gods and saints, Amy Pence carries reminders of life on earth to a higher plateau. In Pence’s The Decadent Lovely, she explores the need for spiritual resolution, safety, detailing her reflections through childhood memory without the sentimentality often imbued through hindsight. Eyeing the late 50’s department store photo of her parents she sees “who they were or were meant to believe they could be…"
Maureen Alsop, Poemeleon
"Amy Pence’s Skin’s Dark Night is a haunting and evocative collection that weaves memory, loss, and trauma into a rich tapestry of lyrical intensity. Through striking imagery and a dreamlike atmosphere, Pence explores the fragility of existence, intertwining nature with human suffering. Flowers, celestial events, and historical wounds become metaphors for resilience and decay, while her cinematic writing style brings raw, immersive moments to life. From deeply personal reflections to historical reckonings, each poem lingers with a visceral impact, making Skin’s Dark Night a powerful meditation on the body, time, and the ghosts that shape us."
Skin’s Dark Night
Available Online From 2River Chapbook Series