The Hartford Book Samuel Amadon

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Poetry Daily

The Hartford Book by Samuel Amadon is reviewed at Publishers Weekly

Samuel Amadon read's "Wells" from his new collection The Hartford Book

 

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Samuel Amadon is the author of the poetry collection Like a Sea (Iowa, 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.

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

“Most poetry written in what might be called the vernacular is evidently a stunt, and we soon weary of such prowess. Sam Amadon has no such self-congratulatory purpose; his speech is helplessly frank in its high and low spirits:

My parents thought they’d keep me safe
      by sticking me in a private school,
but Hartford works its way in no matter
      what you learn & this winter
I’ve come to know the worst people
      the city has in it…

The poet is one of them, and suffers as much as any chronicler since Clough for his own pathetic (even ghastly) powers of presence: this is not memoir, it is confession, 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

“Mesmerizing as well as desperate, a wild-eyed tour of a lesser hell. Amadon claims these poems are almost entirely true--if so, God help him, the truth has been transformed into poetry. Sam Amadon--even his name (like Jack Kerouac) is a song. Sing it."
–Nick Flynn