Amy Beeder
about
Amy Beeder's poetry has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, AGNI, Blackbird, The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Threepenny Review, and The Southern Review. Her fellowships and awards include a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, a Louis Untermeyer Scholership at Bread Loaf, a James Merrill Residency and a Witness Emerging Writer's Award.
A teacher for more than twenty years, Beeder has taught poetry at the University of New Mexico and the Taos Writers conference. She has also worked as a political asylum specialist, a high school teacher in West Africa, a freelance reporter, and a human rights observer in Haiti and Suriname. She lives in Albuquerque.
Beeder's third book of poetry, And So Wax Was Made & Also Honey, will be out from Tupelo Press in 2020.
BOOKS
BUrn the Field
Cockfights, a prophetic turnip, the "pharmack mysteries" of antidepressants . . . in this book the natural world looms as a potent and nearly conscious metaphor for desire, transcendence and loss. The power in these poems comes from a persistently idiosyncratic combination of subject, language and tone: the dark emotion energy of the subjects—illness, witch trials, lost children—the lush, urgent language, and the exacting, wry, relentlessly unsentimental tone
Now make an Altar
Out of this book's gathering of speakers (arsonist, leper, Captain Haddock, the maitre d' of an unusual restaurant) and subjects (dung beetle, Aristophanes, medieval surgeon, methamphetamines) emerges a baroque, musical, and formally inventive history of creation and destruction. Now Make an Altar dispassionately suggests that there can't be one without the other. And there is nothing, however broken, absurd, atrocious, or sublime that cannot be brought into ecstatic focus in this "mysterious feast" of dense and exacting language. "Come in, come sup," Beeder invites us in the book's opening poem. "You'll never feel full."
And so wax was made & also honey
Forthcoming from Tupelo Press
Workshops & Instruction
INDIVIDUAL Instruction
Are you in interested in starting, restarting, or finishing a poetry project? Do you want to return to writing after a considerable hiatus? No matter what your level, I can work with you directly if you desire one-on-one assistance. You may want weekly individualized prompts and critiques to get you started, help with revision, suggestions for reading and/or advice on publishing. Contact me to discuss your specific needs.
Group Workshops
I give workshops, ideally for groups of 4-10. These can always be tailored to your group's specific needs: they may be generative, critique-oriented, focused on craft or form, or a combination of elements. Classes are generally held in Albuquerque, but could be offered in Santa Fe or other places in New Mexico.
Manuscript Work
Do you have a complete or nearly complete manuscript and don't know quite what to do with it? I can read it and provide a three-to-five page critique, in which I'll make suggestions about individual poems, ordering, what to keep (and perhaps discard), title(s), etc. I'll also give my thoughts on where to publish work that has not yet appeared in a journal.
“I love studying with Amy: her prompts send me off in wild directions & encourage me to expand my subject matter & voice. She also tailor-designs generative workshops for my critique group, keeping a perfect balance of learning and creating. Her exercises, like her prompts, are interesting and fruitful.”
“Amy is a deliberate teacher whose poems reflect her erudition. Her classes, like her language-rich verse, challenge and surprise.”
Connotations Press
The American Journal of Poetry
CONTACT ME
Contact me regarding private instruction and workshops rates, readings, or anything else.