HYPERGLOSSIA

REVIEWS

Stacy Szymaszek's Hyperglossia from Litmus Press would be a feminine epic except that it is not feminine. // That is, it is a book that avenges not our sex (woman's sex) but the condition of being sexed itself. // It is an epic not like descent, but  ascent. It is not of one soul moved to observe the world of many, but of a many-souled person who must make sense of the world which insists upon the oneness of each. // The book begins when "She" wakes up with a "fake door where intercourse can occur" and "her speech-producing anatomy" irrepressible, but language does not work at first: "ka ker flutt" // "simian figure tissue massager            ggenerosity" // The language moves, at first wrecked but reaching, wavering in and out of the territory of social/linguistic sense.  The "she" begins to become the "he" of the book, Eustace, and "I was once a private person before this / verbal hippopotamus / but it's hard to shutt up" // The boy Eustace "he wears his hair short" "his crop would grow" "his beard comes thick like the tongue of a water / bird" // but "released from a system of adhesives / a man can / be municipal." // But this is a narrative of a woman who is a boy who is a woman, always kept on the border between public and private, overlapped with identities, taxed and untaxed. // There is this feeling of mistake here: "Eustace is dittographic a copyist error" // also of repression, that "mangling force" which will make our new epics: // "the forgetting preference of a civilization" —Anne Boyer, Books of Poetry

In the challenging tradition of Joyce and Neidecker, Stacy Szymaszek’s new book Hyperglossia is only for the brave. Avant-garde, heady stuff, it demands a lot of the reader, who is advised to keep a dictionary at hand. This book flummoxed me, yet, I kept returning to its magnetic pull. The sparse, economic lines thick with vocabulary seem to borrow from musical traditions, like that of John Cage, that emphasize silence as well as sounds. In Hyperglossia the music of language is as important as what it means. Szymaszek’s alchemical juxtapositions of words often creates new definitions and images smashing that word’s prior associations in the reader’s head. This experience is disorienting, but worthwhile in its ability to challenge old ideas and open minds to the many possibilities of language. -Susie DeFord, BOMB Magazine

There is a remarkable integrity at work in Stacy Szymaszek’s poetry. Perhaps it rises out of her attention to the call of the Midwest, where there are still pockets of humanistic working-class bookishness, far from the circuits of MFA programs and coastal poetry-history meccas. Born in Milwaukee in 1969, Szymaszek is from serial-killer country, and from the land of a cleaning lady named Lorine Niedecker. Like Niedecker, she has emerged to be a wickedly delightful minimalist avant-garde breath of fresh air. Let’s also call her a poet of the polis: she knows that the push and the pull of the social contract is at stake in writing, and she is quick to explore the complex interrelationships of people and the languages they use. Likewise, look for a clever candid libidinal impulse to rise up in the corners of the work. For as Szymaszek said in a recent interview, “All of my work is about the itch of desire that can never be scratched.” Her writing peeks into that world of desire with a fierce determination—desire for the beauty of language, desire for gnosis, desire for the emancipation of the human form from the less-than-perfect sociopolitical world. But don’t think that Szymaszek is all work and no play. Sonically sophisticated and beautifully deadpan, her poetry stations the reader squarely in the quotidian. Perhaps you’ll hear the edges of Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, and the Objectivists here, but there emerges, too, an examination of the fundamental role of language in the era of the Patriot Act. Szymaszek delves into the states of “hyper glossia” that are so much a part of our lives, sorting through the words that flood over us, across the airwaves and from newsstands, and letting sing the voice that wells up deep inside. -Lisa Jarnot, Boston Review

There are, arguably, four known states of experience: waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep, and none of the above. Hyperglossia of course extends the list of states to include phantasm, mellifluousness, physiogenesis, present hereafter … — but more importantly the text intermingles the list. Intermingling of states — the pouring of one state into another — is the actual art of enlightenment (like Dante passing out during his hallucination known as Divine Comedy). Hyperglossia simply turns such art into a poetics. -Robert Kocik, On Contemporary Practice [pdf]

I listened one nite in a basement art gallery in downtown Lawrence, Kansas, to Ms. Szymaszek read for some time. It was a great pleasure to my mind. But it wasn’t until a few weeks later that I held this book in hand and was able to see the words spoken earlier. So I was able to read and see the page before me and before I read any of the back cover blurbs. I simply read this book from front to back. –Jim McCrary, Galatea Resurrects

I can guarantee that she will stimulate your intellect, your senses, and your sensibility.—Vincent Katz, Readings in Contemporary Poetry

PRAISE

Hyperglossia takes us on a journey into the interior where the skin, both liminal and littoral, shifts before us. This movement (“push the boats out/ move them far from my/ inaccuracy”) struggles for and against the sense and eventual record of it. Embodied and disembodied, orienting and disorienting, the mind strives against where a soul might reside, evading the shadows cast by disfigurement, estrangement, or violence. But the itinerant cannot always cover her tracks and the poet hangs on, asking, until the very end, “what of my persuasion now.” -Ammiel Alcalay

“Who is Eustace, and where’s use in that name? How is his tongue doing that thing in my mouth? How is her mouth doing this thing in my tongue?” Out beyond the laws of kinship, Hyperglossia is equal parts kin with Kathy Acker’s In Memoriam to Identity and kari edwards’s a day in the life of p.. Szymaszek’s book proposes a world of post-mortality nobody can be slain in absentia where bodies and souls are transported trans-oceanically in leaky vessels whose very uselessness argues for a radically queer trans-poetics, a kind of transmigratory being in which identity, like gender a tomb, can only fail because one ceases to exist as this or that thing. Hyperglossia nourishes trans-identity, an ailment not to be treated except with anagrammatic homeopathies sibilant whispers which cure our injured declarations of love by transmuting a language that otherwise falsifies us into wholeness and pretends to fix us. Hyperglossia is the critical form disruption takes to interrupt the regime. This is writing as metempsychosis, activating a movement across bodies and names, species and spaces, making what’s been excluded from sense sensible blown pink omissions where we’re all twice dying between honey and shipwreck. –Rob Halpern

Hyperglossia is part anthropology, part anatomy; it is part song and part dissonance. Yet Szymaszek's poetry is always too wily, and too alive with its own pleasures—in short, too wise—to accept any conscription to stable identity. In this “skirmish with a makeshift tongue,” the poet keeps us “attuned to close-calls and eruptions of selfhoods.” Demonstrating that language and identity are “a temporary site,” this poetry is a cultural “mirroror,” full of sly heresies which abet Szymaszek's poetic subversions so that she is able to “elude detection and find company.” Indeed, in her company, we can be grateful to find such a “superior sayerer”–Elizabeth Robinson