Essay, a new book of poems by Stacy Szymaszek, whose life among dairy cows in New York’s Hudson Valley becomes the site of radical tenderness and critique, borrows its title from Bernadette Mayer’s poem “Essay,” Szymaszek’s book also grapples with the romantic idea of the farm as a symbol of groundedness and self-sufficiency, ultimately finding that vision both materially inaccessible and mythically fraught. What follows is a journey through interspecies friendship, queer dailiness, ecological grief, and the moral weight of usefulness under capitalism.

Structured in 25 diaristic entries, Essay moves between the loafing shed and the poet’s desk, tracing the life and death of Donna, a white cow whose luminous presence animates questions of care, personhood, and mourning. Alongside the cows and their human caretakers are spectral musicians—Karen Dalton, Judee Sill, Connie Converse, Julius Eastman—who lived and died mid-life without full recognition. Their fugitive brilliance is woven into the book’s meditation on obscurity, integrity, and posthumous love.

Part elegy, part field report, part ars poetica, Essay continues Szymaszek’s celebration of the ordinary—mud, music, menopause, meal prep—as poetic matter. It resists genre containment, living instead in a lyric commons where cows, queers, and working people make new meaning together. With wit, vulnerability, and devotion, Szymaszek has written an unruly book that expands what a poem—or a life—can be, and insists on the value of attention without conquest, love without return, and a politics of presence attuned to the more-than-human world.

PRAISE

A poet in her “transcendent late middle age,” Stacy Szymaszek takes a grant writing job at a farm where her office neighbors the dairy barn. The cows offer a way of remembering dailyness to a poet whose writing depends on it. She hears “the jaws of the herd moving in unison a hundred times over.” Her eyes become sensitized to cows picking them out of landscapes, even falsely assuming the cat passing by is just a far away bovine. Szymaszek watches the stillbirth of a calf and is then called back to her desk. Such is life in our century. Alongside Szymaszek’s dexterous examinations of music, myth, family, and aging, cows are born, paraded, eaten, brushed, milked and talked to. Essay, in which human and bovine life give one another meaning, contributes to a growing cow poetics that could include genealogical epics and a mode of address direct to cows,

I heard you’re fat…I’m fat too
then there’s a pair of us!

--Ellyn Gaydos, author of Pig Year