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

Cow time meets clerical time meets poet time in Stacy Szymaszek’s gently thrilling Essay. These luminous poem-essays flow with the churning propulsion of dailiness: a roving record of the poet’s ruminations alongside the many cows and calves she befriends. Seeking to honor life beyond usefulness, Szymaszek has given us a large-hearted, gorgeous, and wholly riveting meditation on aging queer life and interspecies friendship on the farm and under capitalism. In Essay, the poet notices, marvels, aches, searches, and wants more for all of us.

—Megan Milks, author of Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows

Stacy Szymaszek has long been a poet attentive to work, and this attention is of course honed by place – whether the urban quotidian and attendant human dramas of previous books, or her present workplace on a dairy farm in upstate New York. In Essay’s conversational, immediate, vulnerable, affecting and affected poems, Szymaszek turns to cows and to the cow-like exhaustion of humans who labor in service of capital’s voracity. Essay is bent to the workday but not beaten down by it. We are offered a visionary form, boldly attendant to the present, to prolong survival without denying death. “The heart of the matter is to be able to keep / loving in the face of cow-sorrow unspeakable brevity / unpredictability and contradictions.” In Essay, Szymaszek has built a bed of hay where we can break from our labors and daydream about the “livelihood where we can all work / a single day and have enough for the year and the work / of the cows can be ended.”

—Alli Warren, author of Sundial