The Hartford Book

by Samuel Amadon

"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

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.

Genres: Poetry

74 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2012

Reviews

[James Murphy]

Near the end of Amadon's bleak collection of poems about Hartford is an ironic image. Next to the poet lives a transvestite named Joy who sells codeine. One rainy day, he says, a family of eight needing codeine stood there for over an hour shouting Joy! Joy! Joy! It's a sardonic comment in a book which presents a vision of hell, a city of declining economy, a city of broken windows and broken pavement through which wander shades worn out by life. In Amadon's Hartford the desperation of the lives he records is scorched by their need for alcohol and drugs. These poems are written in the street-wise language of that desperation. They're gritty and edgy lamentations, and it's difficult to find the lyricism in their wailing. But Amadon's stark image is as unswerving as the rusty train tracks underneath the cool stacks and empty warehouses of Hartford.

[Cat]

I had no intention of reading this book yesterday. I was really looking at it; I thought I might read one or two poems, perhaps leaf through the whole volume. The first poem hooked me in with its raw and vulnerable voice and its hurried, harried ampersands, and I ended up sitting there for two hours and reading the. whole. damn. thing. Which is basically what I am telling you, putative reader of this review, to do because this collection of poems (by my colleague Samuel Amadon) will bowl you over.

It dark, funny, harrowing, and sublime. It is about place, certainly, but it's even more about feeling simultaneously stuck in place and totally lost. It's about compensating for loss through scrambling for connection, intoxication, peaks of experience without corresponding patterns of meaning. The amnesia and bravado of drunk and high bodies colliding into each other and pretending with raucous excess that those displays can cover up the pain of daily life (the fear of being unloved; the realities of cancer, poverty, monotony; the posturing of masculinity; the surprise and ruthlessness of tragic loss). The speaker's toughness still exposes the fear that unless he deceives himself and other people that he will be revealed as inadequate, flailing, a liar. The collection describes a certain corridor of youth where all of the doors appear to be closed and the speaker refuses to open them, no matter how self-destructive that might appear. This poem is also about privilege rubbing shoulders with poverty and the willed self-abasement of the junkie linking both strata of our society. (There's an amazing line about the speaker asking a roomful of people how many went to private school and then followed up with asking who was smoking meth and they put the pipe down to raise their hands eagerly.)

So that's theme and character...I really can't describe the voice or the momentum of the poems. You just have to read them. The book has so many dark, funny moments that twist in your guts; Amadon's wit in the midst of such darkness is like razor wire that you are in serious danger of stumbling into and lacerating yourself on. The narrative elements of the poems also loop back on themselves, so that you get a fuller picture as you go on of the cast of hapless characters and the accrual of losses that the book describes, which, while they are listed in the initial poem, become much more powerful when they return, woven through the speaker's debauches.

When I finished this book, I was gutted. And tentatively, very tentatively and even sadly, hopeful.

[Benjamin Niespodziany]

Wow. This is a heavy collection, one that slips the shoes of addicts onto your feet and tells you to walk down the street, the one without the lights, the one with a dead end. This is the opposite of a Lonely Planet guide to visiting Hartford.

[Carmelo Valone]

Samuel Amadon's poems about life growing up in and around the streets of Hartford ring so very true. There is a bleakness and darkness that he has captured and collated as if they were blood sample slides and he the great Dexter Morgan of poetry.

After reading each poem I want to look back, further and deeper and see the humor within the urban horror. You see I also grew up in the greater Hartford area and know this great sadness and misery the city holds. I look forward to re-reading this book again and again.

Expect more great things from this author soon enough...I'd bet money on it.

[Rodney Welch]

Coldly perceptive, scary, and often bleakly funny poems set during Amadon's down-and-out Hartford days among the misbegotten: drug addicts, alcoholics, and numerous losers, among whom he counts himself (although he's managed to be a survivor as well). The day-to-harrowing-day immediacy of these confessional dramas brings to mind both John Berryman and Denis Johnson, and they build along the way, with characters developing from poem to poem. An astute, reflective and (I suspect, or at least hope) sobering trip through a hell of wasted days.

[Nat Baldino]

Amadon takes us back to something simple that we have all lost, his words are exhausted, desperate, yet sly and reflexive. One of the best works of poetry I've ever read.