Amy Schutzer lives in Portland, Oregon. Her first novel, Undertow (Calyx Books, 2000), was a Lambda Book Award finalist, Violet Quill Award finalist and Today's Librarian Best of 2000 Award winner. The Color of Weather, her second novel, was a Finalist in 2010 Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of literary reviews and magazines including Portland Review, Fireweed, HLFQ, Sequoia and Hurricane Alice.

Books by Amy Schutzer:

Other poems on the web by Amy Schutzer:
"Deliberation at Arch Cape"
"Etymology"
"Round"

About Taking the Scarecrows Down:

"This collection at first seems pure lyric, with its potent images (woman whose mouth is 'a carnelian flame;' clothes 'that smell like years ago'), yet it offers the reader many narratives too. The poet's life unfolds through the natural world, moving along and circling back around like the creek. She moves easily between flashbacks to long-ago neighborhoods, meditations on friends, on death and loss, and the 'resplendent, gold spark' of a bee laden with pollen. Her preoccupation with word origins ('a parliament of owls;' 'a murder of crows') not only provides rich subject matter but is also put to good use in the crafting and shaping of this lovely work."
—Judith Barrington

"With arresting imagery and subtle music, this book does dare to take the scarecrows down: its evocative poems deftly 'negotiate the emptiness / that is the heart of everything.' In the face of loss, absence, longing and mayhem, Amy Schutzer offers us poetry's 'long sky,' its 'stars flowering on the tongue.'"
—Paulann Petersen