Listener

Poetry. "LISTENER bristles with disquiet, its lines a disquisition on the existential situation of the person who listens so hard to himself, 'I found everything / Felt like my head.' Emerging from 'The empty moment before my face surfaces / Before I find I've started the whole thing again,' these poems never escape knowing 'Here I am...I'm no place new,' but they go on to make of thought such an affable trap that we enjoy the sound of it snapping shut on us, too. Each poem makes play out of self's inevitable self-consciousness-'how I saw myself as my own / Toy'-and plumbs the remarkable capacities of poetic language for representation and plasticity, fact and fancy, imagistic precision and prosodic invention. The resulting music brings readers paradoxically back to themselves, to those moments when 'I have a voice I can sometimes find / when my head's in a book, distracted and aware.'"-Brian Teare

Samuel Amadon is the author of Often, Common, Some, And Free (Omnidawn 2021), Listener (Solid Objects 2020), The Hartford Book (Cleveland State 2012), winner of the Believer Poetry Book Award, and Like a Sea (Iowa 2010), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Lana Turner, and elsewhere. He is the author of four chapbooks, including Each H from Ugly Duckling Presse. He regularly reviews poetry in places such as The Believer, Boston Review, Lana Turner: a journal of poetry and opinion, and Rain Taxi. He edits the poetry journal Oversound with Liz Countryman and directs the MFA Program at the University of South Carolina.