understand
later in life
converts
a Catholicism like Auden’s
obligation to the inescapable
reality of this world
verses Poles with nothing
walking the entire
day to Czestochowa
sofa propped up
on bricks burn
mark wreathed
by a stain
fire started by a cigarette
doused with a martini
I have been invited to Paris!
Szymaszek writes like she loves this planet.
Ana Božicevic
In this diptych of poems, Stacy Szymaszek constructs a multiplicity of selves and desires in language that bends, stimulates, disorients, and satisfies, giving free reign to obsessions over identity, queerness, the broad landscape of corporeality that makes these obsessions possible, and with death—in particular, social death. A Reagan-era childhood looms in the “permission to have a story / denied.” Szymaszek’s “story” is a collectivity of narratives overlooked, rejected, and untold—a series of snapshots and moments, skirting linearity, bubbling beneath the surface.
Stacy Szymaszek is a poet and arts administrator. She is the author of the chapbook The Hero Auden (Ugly Duckling Presse), as well as the books Emptied of All Ships, Hyperglossia (each from Litmus Press), A Year From Today, hart island (each from Nightboat Books), and Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (Fence Books), which won the Ottoline Prize and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. She received the 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Szymaszek is a regular teacher at the Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, a mentor for Queer Art Mentorship, and the 2018 Hugo Visiting Writer at the University of Montana. She was the Executive Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church from 2007-2018.
Sometimes when I read Stacy Szymaszek I feel that I am watching colors in the sky. I want to say what she says, "ground me in your palette / and I can hang on." Cause once again in these poems Szymaszek brings the full emotive soundscape of the gai flaneur so versed in their time, they dare imagine behind it. Like time was a televised game of tennis where you look into the past then back to the future, to the bye bye beyond-the-horizon of what we can be, back and forth. The present is the poem, "watched by every human love", formed and styled with the obsession of a lover. Casual obsession -- is that a thing? The voice of Szymaszek is everywhere hovering over the object of the word. Could Auden have imagined these sonic "with-it sermons" and the prismatic frenzy of her collage, the mystical sum of Real where dreams of summering & poet-adulting meet the street of "dumpsters as entry to / and exit from time". Szymaszek writes like she loves this planet.
Ana Božicevic
Chapbook
Hand-bound. 64 pp, 5.44 x 6 in
Publication Date: November 01 2017
Distribution: Direct Only