Hart Island
A long poem about contemporary New York ponders self and society in poetry, politics, and the polis.
In hart island, the poet narrator walks and works in the East Village of Manhattan navigating the day to day needs and desires of a community, an organization, a changing neighborhood, as well as her own. The poem, which begins after she discovers the existence of an appropriated, politically walled-off potter’s field/prison, proposes that others are not figurative or metaphorical, but are literal, material—that alterity can be both a limit and radiance.
REVIEWS
Stacy Szymaszek’s hart island is a personal eulogy, an encyclopedic-esque conversation with the transgressions and transmutations of all the souls Hart Island has attempted to cover and conclude. Disciplined landscapes are what New York is all about (technically, poetry, especially the formal kind, is as well), but Stacy strays from that to construct a complete notebook for the hovering souls floating north of City Island, an internally external offering for the dearly gone. -Ken L. Walker, Coldfront
In Hart Island, there are whispers of people who lie just below perception, muttering multivocal protests of how, based on their status in life, they are placed away and forgotten, invisible shoulders upon which the city (or the poetry world) rests. Not an anxiety of influence, but a murmuring of both injustice and desire to connect, for recognition — for people to either stand at the grave and acknowledge or appreciate, no matter who a person might be or might have been. Toward that, Hart Island is part memory, but it is also active record of life taking place on the page, a liquid unfurling of how language apprehends the incomprehensible about it, as quickly as it takes shape and then dissolves again. -Marcella Durand, Jacket2
Stacy Szymaszek’s recently published hart island is an elegiac poem written as a notebook by the living for the dead, with richly-textured serial verse forms covering the years 2008-2010. While the title and a brief credit acknowledgment bring awareness to Hart Island as a framing concept, Szymaszek also draws on quotes heard and “misheard” from poetry readings at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, where she works as the director. Phrases by authors like Keith Waldrop (“the calming effect of contact”), Steve Carey (“ghost proposals”), and Alice Notley (“life has its sub rosa hell”) bring a multi-vocal community of texts to Szymaszek’s own lyric plenitude. The multiplicity of enfolded images, observations, and historical acknowledgments creates an evolving textual design, and conveys her social awareness and personal stance toward New York City’s managed environments for the living as well as the dead. -Dale Smith, The Boston Review
One of the most inspiring books I read last year was hart island, by Stacy Szymaszek (Nightboat Books). Within these pages is a fascinating examination of place; the images are rich and potent. The deeper the reader goes, the more alive hart island becomes, and we see both the history of a place and the personal wrestle with one another. One of the many strengths of this book is the juxtaposition of the long poem form and the short line; it works as a symbol for a history that is long and requires an intense focus. I think any writer who is interested in writing about a particular place should give this a read. And really, anyone appreciates good poetry should give it a read. -Aaron Reeder, Blue Mesa Review
Here, Szymaszek could easily be in the B&H Dairy, a kosher vegetarian restaurant on 2nd Ave just below St. Marks Place that was closed for months this year after a gas explosion destroyed several buildings and killed two people in its block. None of that had happened yet, in the poem, which is part of a moment that feels like now but isn’t. This is true, also, of the phrases Szymaszek heard or overheard at the Poetry Project and included in the poem, which is followed by a list of quotations, where the phrases are indexed by speaker and date. Attending a reading at the Poetry Project feels to me like being part of a living, public document, particularly now that the audio of many of its readings are archived online. Being there reminds me that the production, readership and exchange of poetry is a community process, and that one history of American poetry is a history of poets together in public and semi-public and private rooms, a history that Hart Island both produces and records.-Davy Knittle, AMERICAN MICROREVIEWS & INTERVIEWS
The poem both asks, "how long before our bodies / can merge with air," and reveals, "skull cup is hidden / in the composition," with equal measure. It dowses readers in sultriness "when conversation / fails there is the mouth so hot / it's borscht on the rocks" while never diverting into a confessional tone. This is a poem for anybody and everybody, but most of all it is a dalliance with language. —Patrick James Dunagan, Bookslut
PRAISE
Stacy’s hart island is so beautiful like the first time I saw 2nd Avenue w cobblestones. This poem’s no story, but all memory & event splash:
places of death redacted
though each unique as in
corner of Broadway and
Houston
She takes on New York’s “potter’s field” in a mode so quotable meaning full of moments all of me wants to occupy. It’s a good book! —Eileen Myles
At the core of hart island is a counter-burial project. Szymaszek exhumes utterances past. Better yet, she mines their latent energy by moving them around, accelerating their particles. In doing so, she reanimates the NYC that we heart. The one in which we can tap into the city’s radically democratizing potential as great collider by going out and taking it all in. —Mónica de la Torre
One cannot know whether the dark shadow of the city in Stacy Szymaszek’s hart island breathes up through the pervasive cement, the trains, “this veneer of civilization” or whether the poet courts the shadow in order to facilitate a healing integration. What we do know is that these poems enliven the quotidian and any propensity we might have for the ordinary thought. They give us glimpses, as if from the corner of the eye, into cracks in the surface where “how a body becomes unwanted” can emerge. hart island is a brilliant, haunting achievement that calls to mind those striking moments when we think we see the hand of God on an otherwise blue sunny day. —Dawn Lundy Martin
