Like a sea
By: Samuel Amadon
Series: Iowa poetry prize; Iowa poetry prize
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Iowa City
Language: eng
Number of pages: 85
ISBN-13: 9781587298608
Subjects: Poetry
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 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.
Notes: "Winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize"--Cover (p. 2)

Iowa Poetry Prize, 2009
Table of contents: title: One. Each H (I); title: Of deadish New England towns sups the incandescence; title: Each H (II); title: North meadows; title: Each H (III); title: Quotes from the Hartford poems; title: Each H (IV); title: Touches the helicopter; title: Each H(V); title: A discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time; title: The curtains are; title: Two. Like an evening; title: Three. Each H (VI); title: Pass-pass, or all my pulses; title: Archipelago this, archipelago that; title: A uselessness of amadons; title: Each H (VII); title: Uncomfortable hand; title: Mum, wag; title: North of Providence; title: Photography doesn't exist; title: Each H (VIII); title: Goodnight lung; title: The barber's fingers move October; title: Each H (IX); title: Each H (X); title: Four. Each H (XI); title: Five. What was drained is flooded and after comes; title: A mountain is; title: Fresh warm; title: A clean shirt; title: Foghorns; title: My Hummel is self-propelled artillery; title: Nine at nine; title: The greenness of grass is a positive quality; title: Cognitive burr.