July 2023 - AudioFile
British poet Amy Key narrates her memoir about love and living alone. Examining her life through Joni Mitchell's influential 1971 album, BLUE, Key relates each track from the album to a chapter in her life, finding frequent parallels between her experiences and Mitchell's. The subjects Key covers range from deeply affecting to fairly lighthearted, and while her composed delivery seems at first to be a mismatch, it ends up working well, softening some of the harsher elements in both women's lives. The emotional vulnerability in Key's writing is supported by her calm tone. While there is a fair bit of repetition between the chapters, Key's narration overall saves this work from becoming too redundant or overwrought. K.M.P. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 03/06/2023
British poet and essayist Key (Isn’t Forever) takes an intimate, idiosyncratic look at single life in her evocative first memoir. Initially spurred by Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue to examine her romantic relationships, Key ended up using the record as a lens through which to examine “so many shades of life.” Lyrics in “My Old Man” about big beds and frying pans prod her to cultivate peace while living alone. At 37, she felt an urgent need to have a baby and considered how and whether to become a mother by turning over Mitchell’s wrenching “Little Green,” which the musician wrote about a previously undisclosed pregnancy. Key describes how struggles with loneliness and singledom can give people “the power to make us the version of ourselves we long for,” and how she eventually found liberation in her solitude by way of Mitchell’s musings. Filled with lyrical turns of phrase, this insightful take on living solo will appeal to poets, dreamers, and anyone marching to the beat of their own drum. It’s a lush and moving memoir. (May)
New Republic - Hannah Rosefield
"[Arrangements in Blue] asks how to build a good life when you don’t have what you want—and how to do so without denying what it is that you want, or the possibility that what you want may come along."
The Guardian - Emma John
"[Key’s] nonfiction debut is a courageously honest meditation on her partnerless life, and her inward and outward search for all the things a soulmate was supposed to deliver. Key’s deeply introspective quest is not just a hunt for what’s missing, but for what she has overlooked… [As] Key’s book demonstrates, there should be no shame in desiring intimacy, or seeking it outside the confines of romance. And those of us who experience long-term singleness need a broader emotional palette than blue."
Lisa McGee
"Profound and poetic, vulnerable yet brave, I devoured Amy Key’s memoir about love, loss, memory and hope. An incredible writer, a stunning debut."
Olivia Laing
"A beautiful, painful, liberating book. Amy Key writes with such tenderness and insight about a life without romantic love at its centre, exacting as to its impoverishments, exultant over its many and unexpected riches."
The Skimm - Dolly Alderton
"[ARRANGEMENTS IN BLUE] observes things about being alone that I have never seen or heard articulated before. It takes its chapter headings from the songs of “Blue” by Joni Mitchell, which gives it a beautiful, effortless structure. I haven’t been so obsessed with a book in a long time. I read it on holiday with a friend, and she couldn’t wait for me to finish it because I wouldn’t engage in any conversation while its pages were open."
Psychology Today - Glenn Altschuler
"[A] deeply, at times achingly personal, meditation . . . Illuminating, instructive, and unsettling, [Key's] book examines sexual attraction, unrequited love, strategies to numb rejection, and the possibilities of intimacy and fulfillment in a life lived in the absence of romantic love — even as she recognizes that ‘if you ask yourself hard questions, you must be prepared not to find an answer."
San Francisco Chronicle - Alexis Burling
"Courageous... [A] bracingly honest read."
Booklist
"Straddling positivity and cynicism, pride and despair, Key's artful inquiry asks us to question our focus on romantic love and consider all that remains outside of it and all that could flourish there, if we let it."
Heather Christle
"From grief to anger to full-throttled joy, Amy Key hits every note of feeling with perfect pitch... An absolutely gorgeous work."
Paul Lisicky
"Amy Key’s extraordinary Arrangements in Blue isn’t merely a commentary on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, but something bolder, more personal and shape-shafting, in line with Joni’s own art in that it takes no starting point for granted."
The Guardian - Hollie Richardson
"Key’s background as a poet is evident: her writing is gorgeously lyrical, but she is also unafraid to share the colder, harsher parts of being single. Arrangements in Blue is a short read, but each page feels so full and worth savouring. I already have friends who have sent me screenshots of the parts that made them feel so seen. And I have sent them mine."
Chicago Review of Books - Gianni Washington
"Key’s honesty in confronting the highs and lows of her emotional history imbues this memoir with all the complexities of authentic love, which does not flee from the bad even as it celebrates the good… Key’s memoir is impressively balanced in the perceptions that it includes… In lyrical prose evocative of the bigness and smallness of existence, Arrangements in Blue demonstrates that it is our own opinion of ourselves that matters most."
NewCity - Sadaf Ferdowsi
"[A] lyrical meditation on the small moments of domesticity, rest and bliss that Key experiences as an independent woman and artist that’s simultaneously complicated by the earnest and ceaseless desire to find a partner and become a mother. Key’s prose melds the investigative with the personal . . . 'Arrangements in Blue' feels more akin to a Joni Mitchell song—strong as it is tentative, wavering as it is hard-hitting, an essay collection whose thoughts rise and fall like ocean waves with Key examining both the wreckage and the treasures that find their way to shore."
Sarah Perry
"Amy writes with rare integrity, courage and style about the pursuit of love–it's somehow both consoling and provoking, and a beautiful and necessary book."
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
"There is a whole life pulsing within these pages, written with both clarity and eloquence, a glittering brightness that glints like stars in a navy velvet sky. A book to be read in astonishment and in admiration. Bewitching."
Sophia M. Stewart
"Looking back at her past romantic longings and collisions, Key considers the (inflated?) value of romantic love and finds her contradictory feelings on the matter reflected in Mitchell’s lyrics. There’s nothing poor-me about Arrangements in Blue; in Key’s hands, solitary life becomes more capacious—and more complicated—than I ever thought possible."
BookPage - Carla Jean Whitley
"By embracing a vulnerability that matches Mitchell’s, Key reveals the full spectrum of human feeling with words honed as carefully as poetry . . . [Arrangements in Blue is] a window into the way one woman has moved through a world that’s quick to define women by their relationships. It’s also an ode to the ways music can give voice to our emotions, sometimes shape-shifting over years to remain as relevant as the first time we hit play."
Sunday Times [UK] - Laura Hackett
"The poet Amy Key’s first book might be the most hyped memoir of 2023 (or at least a close second to Spare)… [Key’s] yawning, cavernous want for love is expressed with a surprisingly sensual, luscious poeticism… This raw, gorgeous, pulsing memoir is…the harbinger of a real talent."
AudioFile - JULY 2023
British poet Amy Key narrates her memoir about love and living alone. Examining her life through Joni Mitchell's influential 1971 album, BLUE, Key relates each track from the album to a chapter in her life, finding frequent parallels between her experiences and Mitchell's. The subjects Key covers range from deeply affecting to fairly lighthearted, and while her composed delivery seems at first to be a mismatch, it ends up working well, softening some of the harsher elements in both women's lives. The emotional vulnerability in Key's writing is supported by her calm tone. While there is a fair bit of repetition between the chapters, Key's narration overall saves this work from becoming too redundant or overwrought. K.M.P. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2023-03-04
A collection of introspective essays about singleness, organized by themes from Joni Mitchell's Blue.
Mitchell's iconic album came out in 1971, seven years before Key was born; when Key discovered it as a teen, it became her guide to life and love. One night when she was 14, “Blue ignited my desire and ambition for romantic love, my idea of how I would press my heart against the world. What appealed, I think, was the way it described the complexities of love. It was the best representation of love that seemed truthful: love as best and worst, joy and sorrow.” The author, now in her mid-40s, has not had a boyfriend in more than two decades. Key, a poet and essayist, excavates this predicament in 10 essays named for bits of Mitchell's songs—Chapter 1: "Love / looking for something, what can it be”; Chapter 2: "Home / the bed’s too big, the frying pan’s too wide"—assiduously interrogating her emotions in a manner similar to a session with a therapist. Though some of Key’s issues are relatable ("I never feel uglier than when I see myself in a hairdresser's mirror"), many are tedious and excruciating. The author writes about how she “used to identify myself as some kind of patron saint of unrequited love,” and she repeatedly acknowledges that her obsession with her predicament makes her even less desirable. However, she has also rejected men who pursued her, and one of them died recently. The most unbearable part of the book details the weeks of his demise, a nightmare of alcohol-induced liver failure. Despite his suffering, Key maintains the focus on how it has affected her. The author writes well about Mitchell’s music, but many readers will be uninterested in the dull story of her not becoming a single parent and the dreary scenes from her solo vacations.
A gathering of uninspiring self-assessments.
