There is a remarkable integrity at work in Stacy Szymaszek’s poetry. Perhaps it rises out of her attention to the call of the Midwest, where there are still pockets of humanistic working-class bookishness, far from the circuits of MFA programs and coastal poetry-history meccas. Born in Milwaukee in 1969, Szymaszek is from serial-killer country, and from the land of a cleaning lady named Lorine Niedecker. Like Niedecker, she has emerged to be a wickedly delightful minimalist avant-garde breath of fresh air. Let’s also call her a poet of the polis: she knows that the push and the pull of the social contract is at stake in writing, and she is quick to explore the complex interrelationships of people and the languages they use. Likewise, look for a clever candid libidinal impulse to rise up in the corners of the work. For as Szymaszek said in a recent interview, “All of my work is about the itch of desire that can never be scratched.” Her writing peeks into that world of desire with a fierce determination—desire for the beauty of language, desire for gnosis, desire for the emancipation of the human form from the less-than-perfect sociopolitical world. But don’t think that Szymaszek is all work and no play. Sonically sophisticated and beautifully deadpan, her poetry stations the reader squarely in the quotidian. Perhaps you’ll hear the edges of Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, and the Objectivists here, but there emerges, too, an examination of the fundamental role of language in the era of the Patriot Act. Szymaszek delves into the states of “hyper glossia” that are so much a part of our lives, sorting through the words that flood over us, across the airwaves and from newsstands, and letting sing the voice that wells up deep inside.
—Lisa Jarnot
from There Were Hostilities
not prerecorded
I’m up
Sunday
morning
to the
young
boy
drumming
at the
ministry
next
door
__________
no ahistorical fences
the neighbor woman
was good looking
they planted a strawberry
patch together
enjoying newfound
expanse of yard
then something happened and
a FUCK YOU FENCE went up
one house had to be sold
but that person returns
the Strawberry Plant Stealer
__________
kayaks
byways of the area
canvas and makings
of a motor :
MERIWEATHER
shell and pivot
hefty hipped
kitchenette
GEEZER
wizened
rustoleum
girl scout
jack knifebuzz of electric egg
freak tide
effects
undersides
scraping
the cement
____________
conditions exist
if it comes at night it will be too late
we recommend sleeping in the basement
if you hear a siren seek shelter
in a bathtub or a in a stairwell
anything that sounds like a freight train
is cause for alarm
open a window or close a window
and seek shelter under a doorway
or if you are in a car drive into a ditch
we will continue covering the possibilities
__________
illegal florescent light
from a rocket shaped generator
seeps from boarded-up house
into fenced-in yard house
__________
forms
is what I have
a PRE-EXISTING
condition?
when is the LAST
TIME I had sexual
intercourse?
new doctor reads
from my chart
mother’s name
father’s name
an emergency contact
gone away
from hyper glossia
he ceased
to exist as a boy be-
came a man whose appellation
has been filed away the hairs of a chin
hearsay of hyper glossia —
my eyes are dyed blue
my breast
plate protects
a spool her nail was lodged
in my skull his root didn’t work
said the cook changed the
valance spooked
panther ran —
__________
panther shoddy
investigation led to an utterance
even death bypassed an unstudied felon
in a composite sketch what a
chatterbox I am —
he went to
a disputed region
and blended I cosseted
the canopic jars of his intestines
the doctor’s medicaments were
efficient she whose nail
afflicted me met an
unluckier day
__________
upon my
calcareous pillow my
brain dreams another me
this one tongue-tied
with no writing
cream
he
has taken a
wine bottle to his
shank is visored in a scalded
tree an inky burgeon
I dip my bruised
fibres into —
keen
__________
last name change not reported to authority”
speech. so who can say they love m.e
wonder no — I mean ?no I infect inflect
my grammatical blunders? ? ? damask rose was code
mathematically sound as any control
what? what she likes ask?ing — I mean,
no some other pronoun
this is a bad day
__________
I was once a private person before this
verbal hippopotamus
but it’s hard to shutt up
when you have certain information that isn’t clear
)though plump) and
you know
what he is doing but not why
at the grave
of a naval officer
while here
some novice
takes my dimensions