APOCRIFA
Amber Flame’s newest full-length poetry collection launched May 2023 from Red Hen Press!
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Amber Flame’s newest full-length poetry collection launched May 2023 from Red Hen Press!
“The expansive and formally inventive second collection from Flame... The strength of this collection lies in the structural ingenuity of its poems...”
apocrifa imagines a love that sits comfortably at the crossroads of commitment and freedom. The developing intimacy between a lover and their beloved is propelled by a compendium of words for love, romance, sex, relationships, and affection that do not lend to direct translation in English. Serving as both titles and markers of the progression of time, these poetically defined words highlight the growing tension of one who claims "i cannot love you enough/to unlove the wide world" and yet is inextricably drawn to the offer of "a place of sustenance, rest, and my delight in your very bones." Heavily inspired by the metaphors and structures of Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), from the Apocryphal books of the Bible, the characters speak to each other with contrapuntal call-and-response while letting us into their private thoughts through epistles, sestinas, odes, and other poetic forms.
“An elegant, loving, and lovely journey. Again and again, apocrifa lifts us up, drops us, then lifts us again. Finally setting us down exactly where we need to be.”
“Part love song, part dictionary of love, Amber Flame’s apocrifa offers us a language for love’s many faces and phases and allows us to bear witness to the lovers’ attempt to ‘sink and surface’ through love together...”