Paper Flowers, Imaginary Birds

Amy Saul Zerby is a roller death derby of sharp and fast clarity … [H]er poems convey a blast of sass and short punchy wonder.

–Derrick Brown, Our Poison Horse (Write Bloody Publishing)

The smart, alluring voice we encounter in Amy Saul-Zerby’s Paper Flowers, Imaginary Birds is by turns zany, dark, casual, lyrical, angry, direct. I say voice, because these poems are constantly addressing us, implicating us as readers, as they map a psychological pathway through love, desire and pain always thrumming just beneath the surface. It’s a sophisticated voice and entirely contemporary, having learned as avidly from Confessionalism and the New York School as from social media. It’s a voice that longs for enlargement and anonymity at the same time; Amy Saul-Zerby’s poems themselves become places for hiding and places for being seen: ‘i am everything that i’m not / when i am a poem in your hands.’

–Richie Hofmann, Second Empire

Amy Saul-Zerby doesn’t know what a cliche is. Her poems are strange new flowers bursting from all angles out of everything.

–Bud Smith, F-250