The Hartford Book (New Poetry) - Softcover

Amadon, Samuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1880834979 ISBN 13: 9781880834978

Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012

Synopsis

Poetry. In Samuel Amadon's intense, second collection, a sequence of meditative and darkly comic postmodern narratives about what it is like to be from Hartford, Connecticut, we stagger with the speaker down the streets of his still-present past, together with a motley cast of crackheads, liars, scoundrels, and unlikely heroes.

"The speaker is on the rack and only timidly aware of the torture he cannot help wreaking. Our poetry will never be the same now Amadon has spoken, our language can be entirely different. Happily for us."—Richard Howard

"These poems are street-smart, buoyantly lyrical, and they possess something beautiful and permanent at their core. Samuel Amadon does for Hartford what Koch, Schuyler, and O'Hara have done for New York City."—Tracy K. Smith

About this title

About the Author:

Samuel Amadon is the author of the poetry collection Like a Sea (University Of Iowa Press, 2010). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, A Public Space, Boston Review, DENVER QUARTERLY, Tin House, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He lives in Houston.

Review:

"As in Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, the landscape of poverty and drugs seems to grow characters and stories like no other--characters with names such as Brass, Okie, Legend, Hercules, and Joy--characters with maybe-fake cancer, ex-hockey players who like to expose themselves in bars, characters who shoot up water--and then absinthe--while attempting to detox." -- The Believer (Winner -- The Believer Poetry Book Award)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1880834979
• ISBN 13: 9781880834978
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 74