I love this photo of me and 3 of 4 of the writers I have worked with over the past 14 years. It was a great night! Jess Barbagallo, Grey Vild, and ray levy uyeda.
Grey Vild, Jess Barbagallo, Stacy Szymaszek, and ray levy uyeda. Photo by Summer Surgent-Gough.
Sharing the beginning here—find the whole review here. Matt’s such a good critical writer and I’m really honored to have his attention on my book.
In her book Beasts of Burden (2017), disability scholar and activist Sunaura Taylor identifies overlapping rhetorics of ableism and speciesism to expose the damaging premises of both. Even progressive environmentalists, Taylor points out, “betray a preference for the whole,” celebrating the supposedly more autonomous lives of wild animals over domesticated ones, and preferring to focus on the structural conditions necessary for sustainable farms rather than ascribe value to any particular animals populating them. Sustainability as a system ostensibly requires that we even take a rationalistic view of animal slaughter, a schema under which caring about any individual creature is viewed as “naive and sentimental.” But Taylor interrogates these deep-seated assumptions, showing how they emerge from a fear of embracing interdependency when in fact, as the feminist and disability theorists she cites have long argued, we are fundamentally interdependent beings; denial of this reality has permitted endless exploitation and oppression. Taylor argues, on the contrary, that any animal, however “dependent”—the state they were born into, in a cruel tautological logic—possesses the agency to “speak to us,” if only we pay heed to them “voicing their preferences and desires.”
You already know I’m going to say a poet is the one who can do it. Stacy Szymaszek’s latest work, Essay, opens with a calibrating:
The sunshine hit in such a way
meticulously tracked since the 1600’s
on that May day recovering from food poisoning it was brighter
than my own flame and ushered in an awareness of eternity the
light on my face within the Victorian house now in our care
touched in its duller burning days the faces of poets philosophers farmers actors
I tried for weeks to say even this much
to find a tone to live in for a while
QAM is thrilled to present “Stacy & Sons,” an evening of readings celebrating poet and Multi-Year QAM Mentor Stacy Szymaszek’s new book, ESSAY. Stacy will read selections from the book, followed by additional readings by her four previous Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellows: Jess Barbagallo, Ricardo Maldonado, Grey Vild, and ray levy uyeda. It’s a literary family reunion 14 years in the making! The free event begins next Tuesday, November 18th at 6:30 PM at the Parkside Lounge in Manhattan.
In conjunction with the exhibit Pasolini: Durations On the occasion of the screening of "Pasolini’s Last Words" (2012, 61 min.) Directed by Cathy Lee Crane.
I ended up not being able to travel to NYC to participate in person so I sent a video of me reading. Enjoy! And thanks to Kimberly Alidio for making the video in her studio. Super grateful the organizers have made a video of the event available online. Watch it here.
This interview happened a little over a year ago and I just never posted it. I really enjoyed talking with Miriam about Essay, which is now a book in the world! Love Miriam Atkin and Wave Farm.
“On this month's edition of "Specific Objects: Talks on Art in the Catskills," host Miriam Atkin speaks with Catskill-based poet Stacy Szymaszek. Stacy reads from their forthcoming book-length poem titled ESSAY (Krupskaya, 2025), and we discuss the poems, covering topics such as loving beyond usefulness, the essay as form, literary lineages, cows, and poetry as a means of / challenge to survival.”
It took a few years to find a home for this manuscript, so I’m delighted that Rescue Press will publish it! I feel a deep connection with their vision and their geographical location. It does feel like a coming home of sorts.
A few poems from ESSAY just posted at BAEST 10, the final issue. BAEST has been a home for my work for the past five years, always in good company. Thank you, Noah Ross.
Bos Books is a one-of-a-kind collection inspired by my obsessions: experimental poetry, poetics and related literature, nature and agriculture, art and the art of simply being. “Bos” (Latin for cow) reflects my connection with these fascinating creatures, who I have the honor of spending many hours with and am writing about. They've gently nudged me to create and share this selection of books. Many I have gathered from across the Hudson Valley, and many are from the personal libraries of me and my poet partner, Kimberly Alidio.
Bos Books currently resides at C. Cassis in Rhinebeck, NY thanks to the owner, liqueur maker, and poet Rachael Petach. They are on hiatus for the winter so check back in the Spring!
Donna the cow drawn by SS
Grateful to Ann Pedone at Antiphony for wanting to publish my long poem Starving Is the Energy. It’s length is between a chap and a book - so maybe a booklet.
Starving is the Energy explores the body, work, technology, and memory, weaving vivid details and moments of humor with reflections on music, literature, and philosophy. Influenced by the works of Antonin Artaud, John Clare, Julian of Norwich, and others, it considers the realities of illness, identity, and mortality while searching for meaning in the tension between life’s tenderness and its harshness. The farm where Szymaszek works grounds the narrative in sensory experiences: the smell of manure and fur, the feel of a curry comb in hand, the sight of a cow's damaged horn. These physical moments provide a connection to cycles of life and death, care and renewal. Recurring images, like cows flicking their horns or leaning into a touch, act as refrains that echo throughout the text, inviting contemplation of how small gestures can hold profound significance. Grooming the cows is both a task and an expression of connection and resilience, a way to push back against a world that often dehumanizes or demands conformity. Through these simple, tactile acts, the work transforms labor into a practice of mutual care, recognition, and quiet healing.
Midway along the journey of her life, a poet and beloved director of the Poetry Project leaves New York City. Though the poems in her new book Famous Hermits (Archway Editions, 2022) are not explicitly in Szymaszek’s signature annual journal form, they do not abandon her field of mastery: the diaristic recording of everydayness as a field for insight, revelation, and moments of pure beauty (or what beauty looks like to me), like the “elder woman” who appears in “Stop Making Peace” to sell her handmade soap, her voice suddenly lineated and descending the page:
mine has more
pine tar
in it
because frankly
I am
a master
of my trade (41)
Read the whole review here.
“In the fall of 2023, it is a bit late to be reviewing Stacy Szymaszek’s Famous Hermits, which came out months ago. But that does not matter so much. In fact, there are parts of Famous Hermits that seem already posthumous. I wouldn’t write that in a review (for fear of sounding morbid), except that Szymaszek said it themselves, in an interview with Sallie Fullerton. To write posthumously means to write for a wider audience than your peers: dead, alive, and future people. That means you have to cast off the provincialism of some US poets, who are so fixated on their US lineages that they forget about the rest of the world.”
Read the whole review here.
On Thursday, October 5th, 2023, I led a thinking-and-reading-through of Paul Blackburn's "Journal: April 19: The Southern Tier," followed by a short reading of my own work, part of The Flow Chart Foundation's CLOSE READINGS IN A VIRTUAL SPACE series.
Read the conversation between me and Sallie Fullerton here.
“The titular poem in Stacy Szymaszek’s new collection Famous Hermits begins with a quote by Agnes Martin, delivered at a Poetry Project talk in 1980. “I know that you’ve been conditioned to…become famous, and make your mark, and all that kind of thing, but you won’t go very far…” Though it appears halfway through the book, the statement settles over the poems like a portentous cloud. A moment of shared recognition and complicity. The poet, however, seems to have already given this idea quite a bit of thought.”
Visit auric’s site to order.
2022
hand-bound softcover, 6.5 x 4.75 in
58 pages, edition of 200
$13
special edition of 26 chapbooks, signed and lettered
with purple covers and a 9 x 5 in broadside
letterpressed by Wry Press - $40
“Stacy Szymaszek’s “The Privilege of Thinking” borrows its title from the poem of the same name by the filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. In both poems, the terrain of thought is the shared space of this world, its landscapes and social conditions. Illumination is no one-way street. Thinking doesn’t radiate solely from the depths of the individual mind, but as Pasolini writes, “there’s light/in the world all around.” In Szymaszek’s poem, thinking in the city — eked out in scraps of survival-inflected time — reflects the city’s qualities: those of motion and vigilance, even a kind of gentle arrogance. But the city is a past-tense place. The present of the poet is in the desert, where a newfound stillness issues its own stark reply.” Selected by Anne Boyer
Read the poem here.
Illustration by R. O. Blechman
Largehearted Boy invited me to share a playlist of music that influenced the writing of Famous Hermits. I found it a cool approach to memoir.
Thank you to editor Noah Ross for publishing poems from a new manuscript. Read them here.
The wonderful poet, scholar, and translator has translated three of my Pasolini poems into Italian at Argo. Thank you to editor Fabio Orecchini for giving Allison and me the opportunity to work together.
Review of THE PASOLINI BOOK in The Poetry Project Newsletter by Becca Teich
“Amidst the upsurge in use of terms such as “babyqueer” or “tenderqueer” which one could say infantilize adults and lower expectations for mature behavior due to a sort of social infancy, Szymaszek inverts the paradigm of the childish adult to reveal the unique nonconformity of the adult-like child. The nonlinear interplay between childhood, gender nonconformity, and queerness reveals this cruel world in which such children are viewed as “both a threat and in need of protection” while simultaneously obscuring and denying children’s autonomy—an all too relevant insight in the midst of the current fascistic onslaught against trans children.” from “On The Pasolini Book by Stacy Szymaszek”
Review of THE PASOLINI BOOK by Giulia Crispiani on NERO.
“In The Pasolini Book, Rome and reality are indeed suspended in Stacy’s memory of it—a non-phenomenological experience driven by the desire to remember everything of a life that is made of two, that is lived by two bodies in two different fragments of a linear vector of time. When he dies, she doesn’t know—only later will she value the relevance of that specific event, she’ll come back to mourn and celebrate that life, she’ll borrow his moves and return to those places to become that man. This is what writing can do—because writing doesn’t fear time.” from “STACY AFTER PIER PAOLO On Stacy Szymaszek’s The Pasolini Book”
order your copies now directly from Golias Books!
“This is a strong and sure book of poetry. Like a city, it is deeply inviting and expansive at every corner. Yet it also provides a solace I didn’t know I needed: as a series of moments and movements toward a queer genealogy. For it is a problem for us, people of the body, that everything disappears, including our ancestors. How can we connect to our blistering and lost history, or speak fully of the curled shame and its sex? The Pasolini Book is a complex sensate record of the poem as location through which life, especially queer life, surges and withdraws. Enter this book as if you are together walking with Szymaszek and Pasolini: enter the smooth stream of the body across time. These poems are not frames for the lost but sites for their reoccurrences; the past hasn’t disappeared – it has become the present.”