Poetry. "'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"--Cole Swensen. Joe Amato is the author of Symptoms of a Finer Age and Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self. His poems and critical essays have appeared in numerous journals, including 88, Chain, Jacket, Bombay Gin, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, Postmodern Culture, Notre Dame Review, Nineteenth Century Studies and electronic book review. He teaches writing and literature at Illinois State University.

Under Virga

Literature & Fiction

Amato, Joe

History & Criticism

Chax Press

A work of highly unconventional literary fiction, Big Man with a Shovel is a modern-day fable in which a powerful laborer befriends a young worker only to find himself pitted against a tyrannical foreman. Set in Upstate New York in 1965, this coming-of-age drama mixes folklore, myth, and metafiction in a story that is by turns playful, suspenseful, and mysterious. Available in paperback and Kindle editions.

Big Man with a Shovel

United States

Steerage Press

A funny, tragic, garlicky chronicle of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in Central New York. Once an Engineer is a funny, tragic, garlicky chronicle of a dozen years spent growing up on the wrong side of the tracks. The tail end of the sixties finds Joe and his younger brother, Mike, living with their divorced and unemployed father in a low-income neighborhood on the edge of Syracuse, New York, a once prosperous city now down on its luck. Mike and Joe mature under their father’s distinctively masculine tutelage, but their dreams of a better life are tempered by the harsh realities of public assistance. When the brothers are offered the chance to attend college, they are drawn to the engineering profession, with its seductive promise of middle-class wages and social status. At the same time, their father’s trade, furniture finishing, succumbs to a new era of industrial and economic change, and as the gap between father and sons widens, they come to learn the true costs of upward mobility. Once an Engineer tells the story of three lives rooted in the moods and lore of Central New York, and the difficulty of finding meaningful work in a world gone inexorably, technologically global.

Once an Engineer: A Song of the Salt City (SUNY Series in Italian/American Culture)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Excelsior Editions

FINALIST - 2009 ForeWord Book of the Year in the Autobiography/Memoir Category A funny, tragic,  garlicky chronicle of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in Central New  York. Once an Engineer is a funny, tragic, garlicky chronicle of a dozen  years spent growing up on the wrong side of the tracks. The tail end of the  sixties finds Joe and his younger brother, Mike, living with their divorced and unemployed  father in a low-income neighborhood on the edge of Syracuse, New York, a once  prosperous city now down on its luck. Mike and Joe mature under their father’s  distinctively masculine tutelage, but their dreams of a better life are  tempered by the harsh realities of public assistance. When the brothers are offered the chance to attend college, they are drawn to the engineering profession, with  its seductive promise of middle-class wages and social status. At the same  time, their father’s trade, furniture finishing, succumbs to a new era of  industrial and economic change, and as the gap between father and sons widens,  they come to learn the true costs of upward mobility.  Once an Engineer tells the story of three lives rooted in the moods  and lore of Central New York, and the difficulty of finding meaningful work in  a world gone inexorably, technologically global.   “…Once an Engineer is  about a world both coming apart and coming together, about the specializations  that make communication between groups impossible even as technologies afford  greater opportunities for communication.” — eveningredness.net   “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.” — Michael Joyce,  author of Liam’s Going: A Novel   “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.” — Frank  Lentricchia, author of The Music of the  Inferno

Once an Engineer: A Song of the Salt City (Excelsior Editions)

State University of New York Press

Samuel Taylor is not a rock star - Samuel Taylor is a writer. Samuel Taylor is not a rock climber - Samuel Taylor is a teacher. Samuel Taylor has lost his job, Samuel Taylor has lost his wife, Samuel Taylor is beginning to lose his fortitude. Samuel Taylor is beset by moral failure, by mortal failure, by the failure of his species to safeguard its survival. Samuel Taylor must do better than to fail better, and failing that, Samuel Taylor must find in failure the means to move forward.

Samuel Taylor's Last Night: A Novel (American Literature)

Dalkey Archive Press