The Hartford Book

by Samuel Amadon

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781880834978
Publisher:	Cleveland State University Poetry Center
Publication date:	12/15/2011
Series:	New Poetry Series
Edition description:	CLEVELAND STATE UNIV. POETRY CENTER
Pages:	74
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

Hartford has proved to be a continuing inspiration to poets, though the city of Amadon’s second collection is a very different place from that of Wallace Stevens. “My mother says Asylum Avenue’s/ the wrong place to start,” begins one early poem, “because the neighborhood’s still// too nice which makes me think/ my mother hasn’t been/ paying attention and doesn’t know// what drug dealers look like.” In this plainspoken, youthful, but wearily cynical voice, Amadon (Like a Sea) offers a tour of Hartford’s underbelly, street by street (many poems are titled with street names), where drugs, too little money, painful family lives, and his troubled postcollege roommate Kenny (“when// Kenny told me he loved me I told him to hold still/ because I had to dab a napkin at/ the cut in his scalp where our friend// Sully had stabbed him minutes before”) make it hard to imagine things getting much better. While the poems do have a sameness of voice and texture to them, this book depicts a life that’s anything but enviable but mostly intoxicating to watch over Amadon’s shoulder; we feel as he comes to finally feel about Kenny: “the truth is I never/ wanted him to get sober like nobody/ really wants any of us to get sober/ they just want to take/ the scarier ride one time & be gone.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly