Divers

Marking a formal reinvention for the poet, this collection addresses the strangeness of time, blending writers and images from the past with contemporary scenes.

This book-length sequence of turbulent sonnets follows their speaker’s impulses and imagination through the seasons of their composition. Written between 2016 and 2022, Divers is a collection shaped by contradiction and marks a new period of lyric experimentation for poet Sam Amadon. These poems are rigorously constrained while also making space for improvisation. They hold to a decasyllabic line while moving in and out of meter. They sing of time, and struggle to understand it. They find words for our moment in the pages of old books. Lines from great writers of the past—including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Wyatt, and Michael Drayton—echo through Amadon’s poems of contemporary menace and wonder. Here we see both the owls lining our fences and the black SUVs rolling down our streets. Out of these conflicts, Amadon’s sonnets step up, lift off, and dive into themselves.