Details

Subject(s)

• Poetry [Browse]

Library of Congress genre(s)

• Poetry [Browse]

Series

Iowa poetry prize [More in this series]

Summary note

"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 lyricto 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."--BOOK JACKET.

Action note

Committed to retain in perpetuity — ReCAP Shared Collection (HUL)

Awards

Iowa Poetry Prize, 2009

Contents

• One. Each H (I)
• Of deadish New England towns sups the incandescence
• Each H (II)
• North meadows
• Each H (III)
• Quotes from the Hartford poems
• Each H (IV)
• Touches the helicopter
• Each H(V)
• A discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time
• The curtains are
• Two. Like an evening
• Three. Each H (VI)
• Pass-pass, or all my pulses
• Archipelago this, archipelago that
• A uselessness of amadons
• Each H (VII)
• Uncomfortable hand
• Mum, wag
• North of Providence
• Photography doesn't exist
• Each H (VIII)
• Goodnight lung
• The barber's fingers move October
• Each H (IX)
• Each H (X)
• Four. Each H (XI)
• Five. What was drained is flooded and after comes
• A mountain is
• Fresh warm
• A clean shirt
• Foghorns
• My Hummel is self-propelled artillery
• Nine at nine
• The greenness of grass is a positive quality
• Cognitive burr.

Show 33 more Contents items

Other title(s)

Project Muse UPCC books

ISBN

• 1587298600 (pbk.)
• 9781587298608 (pbk.)

LCCN

^^2009933597

OCLC

489374533

RCP

H - S

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