BOOKS
New! Interview at Jacket (37, early 2009) with Chris Pusateri.
Samuel Taylor's Last Night -- Dalkey Archive Press, forthcoming
Think of it as a campus novel from hell.
Big Man with a Shovel -- Chax Press, forthcoming 2010
The charm and power of Amato's book is in its mutability. You approach it as a child at night chasing a firefly into the woods. Just when you think you've got it, it's blinking over there, elsewhere. When you do finally trap it, it illuminates the whole dark dome that has swelled around your narrative pulse. Amato's text moves easily through working class narration, American folklore, high academic palaver, war narrative, editorial splashback, history and ephemera, in an intelligent, erudite, and passionate novel. Read it and be reassured, though not.
Once an Engineer: A Song of the Salt City -- SUNY Press, 2009
Joe Amato's Once an Engineer is an amazing display of stylistic range: on the one hand, a kind of writing so direct, blunt, and even brutal that it succeeds in the difficult art of erasing itself as art; on the other hand, a writing of high literary self-awareness and sophistication that won't let us forget that there is no exit from writing. In either register, a great pleasure.
Riveting from beginning to end, Amato's accounting of the small,
opportunistic, almost haphazard moments that change the course of one's
life is both funny and wise.
Pain Plus Thyme -- Factory School, 2008
In a jam, the poet packs his own signals, jams sound against the grain of sense and words against the wall of the margins, jamming with both the message in the bottle and the bottleneck of its messy (distorted by time) arrival. "Did you say something tomorrow?" Think feedback, think big guitar god solo, and fasten your eyes and ears to a book that'll belt you. Amato plays his urgent material "just for kicks" and "for keeps," and this absolutely fearless and volatile mix of clowning and erudite commitment gives his work a life like nobody else's. Breaking rules we might not have been aware of (or alert to our allegiance to), Pain Plus Thyme is a hard-hitting, clear-eyed critique of culture, as well as a "romp" through preserves both political and personal. Did I say that it's good? It's fucking awesome.
"Careful, mes amis -- hijinks ahead."
Finger Exorcised -- BlazeVOX [books], 2006
Amato gives us irrepressible ruminations, flash narratives,
verbal collages. At times they seem to be struggling to rise off the printed page
into our simulated 3D, stereo, holograph world, but then they recoil from it with
speedy wit and righteous indignation, in a weave of rhetorics designed to ward off
the 21st century's demons.
Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture -- University of
Iowa Press, 2006
New! Review at PMC (18.3, May 2008) by Susanne Hall.
Review at Jacket (31, October 2006) by Mark Wallace.
Pioneering a viable interface between poetic practice and
scholarly responsibility, Amato's is a necessary voice in performative engagement
with the labor-intensive underside of academic work. His command of vernacular
locutions ranges from impressive to dizzying. Allied to such discerning critical
intelligence, such proficiency has the potential to alter -- and certainly refresh
-- the nature of scholarly discourse.
1. Buy it.
2. Listen up.
3. Deprofessionalize.
4. Buy a copy for a friend.
5. Write a book like this.
6. Industrial Poetics is da bomb.
7. Because the taste is what counts.
The second "Track" (chapter) of this wild, hilarious, learned, irreverent,
energetic, nasty, and touching book is called "How a Former Professional Engineer
Becomes a Former English Professor." And that's what Industrial Poetics is
all about: working-class aspirants for middle-class 'professional' goodies,
academic and journalistic hypocrisies, community failures, and the general all-
around mayhem we experience at the turn of the twenty-first century. A collage of
techniques from anaphoric verse to slangy dialogue, from pop song to scholarly
reference, Industrial Poetics will make you laugh and sometimes cry with
exasperation. Can life on the assembly line and in the ivory tower really be this
absurd? Answer, oh yes, and then some.
Under Virga -- Chax Press, 2006
"An ingenious gathering of poignant leapfrogging ... a muscular memorializing ... a sly haunting." This is the book that's everything Amato says it is and is not. It bounces on water, refuses to be paraphrased, and invites itself to dinner. Buy it by the case while there's still time.
Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self -- SUNY Press,
1997
Bookend sets the stage for a new kind of writing.
Joe Amato's passionate, acrobatic, and audacious engagement with the limits of
discursiveness aims to repixelate our reception of virtual culture. Like a test
pattern coming from just beyond the Gutenberg Galaxy, Bookend's static is
a call for us to readjust our sets.
Situated somewhere between the world of print and cyberspace, Amato's
Bookend is an amazing read -- fast, provocative, learned, hypertextual,
fun.
This is a difficult book aware of its joys; a joyful book aware of its
difficulties.
Symptoms of a Finer Age -- Viet Nam Generation,
1994
For most of this century poetry has been coy about speaking its mind, and
there have been persistent rumors that poetry has nothing to say, that it
is a great former of forms but silent. Amato's poetry speaks, and it is important
that we listen.