The Hartford Book (Cleveland State University Poetry Center)

Poetry. In Samuel Amadon's intense, second collection, a sequence of meditative and darkly comic postmodern narratives about what it is like to be from Hartford, Connecticut, we stagger with the speaker down the streets of his still-present past, together with a motley cast of crackheads, liars, scoundrels, and unlikely heroes.

"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

"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