Often, Common, Some, and Free

Samuel Amadon is the author of Like a Sea, The Hartford Book, and Listener. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Nation, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Lana Turner, Volta, and elsewhere. He is the director of the MFA Program at the University of South Carolina, where, with Liz Countryman, he edits the journal Oversound.

“I soaked up these poems like a character wandering from pool to pool in a John Cheever story. I dove into them as into an enchanted David Hockney swimming pool painting. Samuel Amadon immerses you in the ‘advanced fantasies’ of a silver-tongued poet. Meaning is never exactly narrative. It’s saturated with vernacular fluency, lyrical acuity, expressive idiosyncrasy. You simply have to read this fascinating book to grasp its mercurial energies, its enigmatic clarity. Often, Common, Some, And Free is remarkable and wonderfully irreducible.’”