LITERATURE + LECTURES

Brazos Bookstore presents book signings and discussions with Samuel Amadon & Alex Lemon, Monday, May 10 at 7pm.

Samuel Amadon was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, Boston Review, VOLT, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the author of the chapbooks Advice for Young Couples, Goodnight Lung, and Each H, he is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Houston and the coeditor of Projective Industries, a chapbook press. His first book, Like a Sea, won the Iowa Poetry Prize.

About Like A Sea - 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 lyric to 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.

Alex Lemon (pictured) is a poet and memoirist. He is the author of Happy (Scribner), the poetry collections Mosquito (Tin House Books), Hallelujah Blackout (Milkweed Editions), Fancy Beasts (Milkweed Editions) and the chapbook At Last Unfolding Congo (horse less press). His writing has appeared in Esquire, Best American Poetry 2008, Satellite Convulsions, Tin House, The Bloomsbury Review, The Southern Review, AGNI and jubilat, among others. Among his awards are a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He is co-editor of LUNA: A Journal of Poetry and Translation and is a frequent book reviewer. He teaches at Texas Christian University and lives digitally at www.alexlemon.com.

About Happy: A Memoir - "Alex Lemon takes his reader inside the terror and strangeness of illness—and gives us, along the way, a loving portrait of a devoted, wonderfully nutty mother. Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity.”
—Mark Doty, author of Dog Years and Fire to Fire

About Fancy Beasts: Poems - In Fancy Beasts, the author of Hallelujah Blackout takes on California, the 2008 election, plastic surgery, Larry Craig, wildfires, Wal-Mart, and rampant commercialism — in short, the modern American media culture, which provides obscene foil for his personal legacies of violence and violation. This pivotal book captures the turning point in a life of abuse, in which the recovering victim/perpetrator puzzles through the paradigm of son-to-husband-to-father. Frenetic, hilarious, and fearless, these poems are a workout — vigorous and raw. Yet they are also composed and controlled, pared down and sculpted, with a disarming narrative simplicity and directness. Even when dealing with toxic content, the point of view is always genuine and trustworthy. This stunning achievement marks Alex Lemon’s best work yet.