A YEAR FROM TODAY

A distinctive, book-length poem written over the course of a year that carries forward the lineage of New York School poets.

A Year From Today traverses a many-layered urban terrain—social, political, poetic, animal—in a form more raw than a diary, weightier than a series of sketches, more idiosyncratic and implicated than a conceptual program. Among this volume’s many insights is how we spend our days detecting, minute-by-minute and phrase-by-phrase, an overarching aesthetic and moral design. It’s for the kind of grown-up who might say, “don’t/look for/who’s really in charge c’est moi.” And for the kind of sensitive brigand who might add, “maybe the way to go about this/is to stay within earshot & sip the Wild Turk.”

REVIEWS

Mystical disruptions are textured into the ephemeral movements of A Year from Today—a found scarf, a line read from a poem suddenly enacted in the Poetry Project’s Parish Hall—and jut up against Szymaszek’s frustrations with time’s ordered obligations. Time, situated around money rather than a life in writing, is particularly obfuscating: “struggling with the 3 year / budget     thinking about years / in threes.” “I wish I could admin     pain / away,” Szymaszek writes, but there are other methods for addressing these diminishments—mainly, through aesthetic transformation: “I say outrageous things / dress up my speech every day     in overstatement     is when I feel closest / to my gods.” This work in language is a devotional site where hyperbole is a refusal of the acceptance of mediocrity. Speech puts on a good outfit and walks out into the art of the day. -Nick Sturm, The Georgia Review

The book demands patience and persistence from its reader, who is asked to witness that “it’s hard to get to know someone/ to the point of prediction.” If Szymaszek’s goal with this journal is “to embroider/ a new universe with new information,” it succeeds both on its own merits and as a part of the larger trilogy. -Publishers Weekly

If the diary can be understood as a vehicle of self-scrutiny, then it is so here, though the terms of that temperamental quest are only suggested, allowed to separate from the arrival of one perception into the next. Or, by contrast, the arrival of perception is shaped by the ongoing mediation of the poet regarding her present reality in contrast to the historical frame her life inhabits. -Dale Smith, Lambda Literary

Stacy Szymaszek’s most recent book, A Year from Today, exemplifies a verse record, or a poetic diary, which documents one year of the writer’s life in stunning verse. She does not shy away from imparting details in it, chronicling everything from her passing thoughts to the day-to-day activity of a life in New York City. Stacy and I met frequently in person to discuss the book and conducted the interview via email. -Tommy D’Addario, Cutbank

There are many types of archives, and Szymaszek’s A Year From Today is about future and belief… There the book will continually visit, cyclically, a year from today and many after. -John Rufo, The Poetry Project December 2018 / January 2019

Szymaszek banishes the private in the diorama of an encounter with everybody else’s dreams, a coyly utopian image. -Kay Gabriel, Believer Magazine

PRAISE

Every flying thing needs a place to land, and even time is not immune to the allure of a poet with her sun in Cancer. A Year From Today builds time a nest in which to chill, which sounds soft, and is, in the way that Pasolini was soft, and New York City is also soft, and every line in this book is a soft inerrant heresy against that hard god productivity.  The passerbys, the test results, seasons, work crisis, and carb counts accrue unhacked, material, and unrefused in this final work of Stacy Szymaszek’s notebook trilogy.  She makes a history here that perfects poetry’s cool anti-valor, which I love, and it makes me happy we get to walk down the street with her. -Anne Boyer

In this growing compendium of days, now comprising three texts (Hart Island, Journal of Ugly Sites and other Journals, and this present volume), Stacy Szymaszek provides us new categories through which to engage a poetics of the archive. We ask as we read: what are the limits of material being, how many moments of looking and naming constitute experience, and what happens in the afterlife of an event, once it has become memory? An engrossing read: animated by the time and people passing through it yet refreshingly light on gossip. -Renee Gladman

In ambulatory annotations, Stacy Szymaszek gives voice to the unregulated, circumstantial, stubbornly poetic unfolding of her days and nights. She is a remarkable chronicler of wakefulness, vacillation, and tenacity. As a handbook in duration, as well as a sequence of fragmented verismo arias, A Year from Today demonstrates the stringencies and pitched frequencies of artistic vocation, its thrills and its incremental dolors, and thereby gives us treasurable lessons in how to thrive under pressure. -Wayne Koestenbaum