EMPTIED OF ALL SHIPS

REVIEWS

These stanza-pearls are dressed in tight corsets emulating a Roman, masculine brevity. Her use of craft (‘last to touch / your craft’) tells us shucks we are outside the law… –Julian T. Brolaski, EOAGH #4

To read Emptied of All Ships is to enter an unfixed universe of ideas with taut internal logic, multiple shifts in perspective, syntactic gaps, and a strapping, nearly epic synechdoche. It is a world where sensual juxtapositions abound and elude keeping the reader off balance. The form is at once conrete and motion-filled… Sections of the book are themselves indeterminate (as the table of contents goes), but in the actual text there is a new work of visual art between each. Many of the images contain a spidery script, indecipherable symbols, or a hint of calligraphy that directs the reader’s attention to the possibility that the letters that make up the words in the text are themselves interpretive hinges that can release manifold signification. These drawings throughout the book act as cartography to mark our way through the unsettled whole, while Brenda Iijima’s ghostly and panoramic cover art brings us right into the vortex of water’s creative and destructive force. –Denise Nico Leto, Xantippe 4/5

Her lines may be tightly controlled, stripped down to the minimum, but they allow for largesse of interpretation as bountiful, fluid, and full of inherent contradictions as the sea itself… –Laura Sims, Jacket 28

Szymaszek’s Emptied of All Ships provokes many questions with language that is both evocative and subtle; moreover, this book signals a new way of perceiving in American culture of desire and leaves the reader waiting and wondering what Szymaszek will do next. –William Allegrezza, Galatea Resurrects #6

Reading Emptied of All Ships, one is lulled as by waves, by narrow lines of verse flowing, page by page, most of the composed of only one or two words. The whole book takes seafaring as its métier, and this is both literal and metaphoric, historical and current, about craft and emotion. As abstract as much of the language is due to its determined diminishing of syntax’s constraints, still the personal keeps making itself felt: width of/ back/ belted// sodium/ poultice// exhausts/ courtship”; “drain/ a home/ of you”; “phenomena/ foregone/ for me”; and significantly, “assonance/ her aspect.” —Vincent Katz, Readings in Contemporary Poetry

Szymaszek’s first book arrives with an impressive air of solidity. If it were a “craft” it would be of the handmade variety, the kind mulled over for long hours over much conversation, much looking at it in various lights, and with a variety of varnishes. It would be seaworthy. Unsinkable. Here the resonance of form deepens the content. Luscious word play lingers on the page, the poem a kind of chute (the water metaphors will not be kept in check…) down which it is an absolute pleasure to tumble. I never got tired of the movement, never craved another sort of motion, my eye just tumbled, and tumbled. … Later the play intensifies; line breaks too: “one sketch/of the stormy/petrel” a visual and oral punning, the recurring ink, the puff of words, the ting–ting-ting-ting, Language, I dashed across page 33 is a conveyor belt, the poet sorting, the poet conducting… —Sina Queyras, Lemonhound

From the title of the poem “shift at oars” we imagine a boat being rowed in the “reservoir” of a great lake, and its potential energy. A sequence emerges that is impervious to changes of time, space, and—insofar as possible—shifts in technology. You can’t deconstruct a Szymaszek poem. —Bill Sylvester, Ecopoetics

The lineage of Herman Melville and Charles Olson, which measures the American power to make space from semiotic and symbolic capital is extended in Emptied of All Ship. From Gilgamesh to Maximus, from Homer to Susan Howe, Szymaszek’s ships carry epic orders of relevance. Like Olson, Szymaszek takes on the imperial historical horizon through the mythological expansion of the self. Where Szymaszek differs from Olson is in her desire, which mines Susan Howe, to dissolve logistical residue and masculine markers that score this horizon … Emptied of All Ships stays true to archetypal complex that binds Szymaszek’s energy to space. Ultimately, navigation in “backward / body” cannot escape Neptune’s ink. —Kenneth Warren, Poetry Project Newsletter

How do you feel about the critical response to your book and has it had any effect on your writing?: Ken locates me within an Objectivist tradition, which I really like, Bill locates me as a writer of the Great Lakes region and has a lot of really lovely readings of certain passages, noting the humor, which is an important element. I really want someone to come at this text as a queer text and an erotic text. There is a lot of erotic activity happening on that ship and I feel like it's being desexualized. No surprise. It's not overt enough to be picked up on by mainstream gay culture and it's easy enough to let it slip by if you're not inclined to think about it. But it's the secret of the text, except it's an open secret, like a big lavender hanky flapping in the wind. —Interview by Kate Greenstreet at every other day

PRAISE

Stacy Szymaszek places her readers in a border situation. Here is a poetics of extreme condensation. “ink a hinge here/ ‘n here/ ‘n mother/ make me limber.” Where traces are, lines remain. Magic is implicated in every shot and countershot. This is idiosyncratic and stunning work. —Susan Howe

Each poem is what I am looking for: a resonance with a particular location, an intelligence unafraid of its humanity, a sort of desperate adequacy with the people or objects that Szymaszek encounters. —Etel Adnan

Emptied of All Ships is a setting out into crucial waters. Each word here has its own weight and position—its own vital movement between poles of loss and discovery. With our sight-lines thus widened, the observance itself becomes activated—another mode of transport. A poetry of brevity is a tough task (especially the word-as-line), but in these pages it registers as achievement. —George Albon