Like a Sea
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Drawing equally from Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, John Berryman, and Robert Frost, Samuel Amadon’s award-winning Like a Sea is a collection of poems where personality is foregrounded and speech is both bizarre and familiar. Central to this weirdly talky work is “Each H,” a sequence of eleven monologues and dialogues wherein an unknown number of speakers examine their collective and singular identities while simultaneously distorting them. From a sequence of pared-down sonnets to a more traditional lyric to a procedural collage inspired by J. D. Salinger, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Walter Benjamin, Jane Kenyon, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Primo Levi, Eugenio Montale, and Edwin Arlington Robinson, Like a Sea is a book of significant variation and originality.
Amadon’s electric collection begins with the line “I could not sound like anyone but me,” and through a wide range of forms and styles and voices he tests the true limits of that statement. The image of a half-abandoned Hartford, Connecticut, remains in the background of these poems, casting a tone of brokenness and haplessness. Ultimately Amadon’s poems present the confusion and fear of the current moment, of Stevens’s “river that flows nowhere, like a sea,” equally alongside its joyful ridiculousness and possibility. Rather than create worlds, they point out what a strange world already exists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Amadon s memorable debut displays a rare combination of avant-garde technique with down-to-earth, up-to-the-minute subjects: flat diction, impossibly long or cut-up sentences, and catchy repetitions portray lives, cities, and landscapes full of dejection, failed promise, and half-built hopes, especially in and around Amadon s native Hartford. Comfort is what burned exactly where/ you were, then left/ guessing that you would like your rest/ to mean take less, reads a representative sentence: syntactic difficulty resolves to show how hard, how comfortless, the places in Amadon s viewfinder remain. Disappointment stalks the urban core, but also the faceless suburbs: Here s a street looks/ like other streets I have no idea what/ fills trees, he admits, and, elsewhere, after a flood there will be nothing// but to build a replica of where we were/ when we did not keep worthwhile worthwhile. Expert technique, small words, and bitter moods bring Amadon s aims close to those of Graham Foust, or even to Robert Creeley. If the most personal poems seem paradoxically abstract, the poems about places stand out, in their forbidding emotions and in their serious interest in geography, in what gets built and what gets allowed to decay: this is what we have/ chosen, to value this/ looks like we have chosen before.
