journal of ugly sites

& other journals

Winner of The Ottoline Prize, selected by Brenda Hillman. 2015

Stacy Szymaszek's free-range attention is fixed on what is just underfoot and just in the line of sight: the replete objects of homely desire, homely repulsion. Beloved dying dog, worthy work, relational obligation, self-entertainment, an anxious curative. In the tradition of the New York School of dailiness and relative effervescence, this work brings a timely recasting of contemporary attachments.

it's a sauna in here

dancer sweat entering
humanity's glands//

PRAISE

What is it to be contemporary with one’s time? The exaltation of the quotidian! These are dystopic times surely: broken intercoms, “American infrastructure getting a D”, samsara breathing in & out of each individual pore. Human heartbreak in all the realms, from the suffering of beloved animals, to emotional intensity of partners, friends. It’s highly charged, pithy and “personal”. What makes this interesting is not only Szymaszek’s honest engagement with particulars of blood, guts, vomit, sick rat etcetera but also her chosen form: short quips, slashes, epigrammatic poetry that hits hard and fast on the senses. She’s shadow boxing with the phenomenal world! We also get bird’s-eye view from within the dynamic downtown New York poetry scene veering back and forth to Carroll Gardens and its colorful contrasting dailyness. The voting line is slowest there. Icons Walt Whitman, Peter Hujar, Joan Mitchell, Robert Duncan surface as the macaroon shop closes. Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals is a brilliant tantric meditation on the endlessly fascinating urban charnel ground. —Anne Waldman

Read this book. Carry it with you like a psalter. The poet’s journal becomes my journal as all distinctions between author and reader dissolve into my days/daze. An inventory of pet peeves, pet virtues, and pet loves, this collection recalls the lessons of Everybody’s Autobiography and Stanzas In Meditation, two very different aspects of Gertrude Stein both found here. Word stelae mark the mourning of lost feelings to rejuvenate our devotions. Stunning enjambments and astute diagonal slashes are used to separate file and folder names in path statements. A Baedeker’s guide to future ruins. Each line is a testament to timeless preoccupations with diet, attachments, and mortality. The poet’s family is our family. We are sick. We are well. This book is the poetic equivalent of Michel Foucault’s The Care of the Self. Moral, cunning, and passionate, Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals traverses country to city, reporting news of crumbling aqueducts, the dyspepsia of public life, and antiquity in its last days. Our bodies, our buildings, our pleasures—this volume becomes us. —Gregg Bordowitz

It is the rare gift of Stacy Szymaszek’s Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals that the ordinary, in all its beautiful complexities, is extraordinary. These are journals of pure human yearning mid-grime and love, mid-ordinary anxieties (landlords, health, toxic waste, bloody leakings of the ill animal on every thing in the house, the patience of that). Initially poetically restrained as if to fend off the ugly, the walking body increasingly streams “ordinary” sadness: Greenpoint, the East Village (toenail fungus of a shoeless man sitting), the subway, the apartment—until almost opera in the best Pasolini sense. I love the graphic tracking of dark and light of domestic love, of the beloved dog’s last hard hours, of work, friendship. “journal of ugly sites” is a dazzling pulsing rendering of a time and place where poetry is made. —Gail Scott

reviews

Stacy Szymaszek’s Journal of Ugly Sites meets this need for a different kind of mind. Where there are abstract animals in Vap’s book, Szymaszek puts love. Where there is lipstick down the throat of a rat, she puts her dying dog Cass, “sleeping between our heads peeing on both our pillows during the night using towels for pillows.” The poet’s relationship to Cass, the beloved dog whose life and death create the narrative through-line, manifests love—love made real not by egocentrically shaping the world to reflect beauty but rather through ecocentrically allowing another’s suffering to transform the self. ... The overlooked transient has been celebrated in the American prose poem since Gertrude Stein’s paeans to the domestic sphere, collected as Tender Buttons. From Stein through Notley, Mayer, and Susan Howe to this recent generation of writers like Vap and Szymaszek, feminist poets have been using the prose poem to challenge a boundaried subjectivity particular to Western dualism. They have used hybridity, collage, associative logic, intertextuality, polyvocality; they have refused to build a wall between the lyric and narrative, personal and public, sacred and profane, self and other. They have sung messy, ‘meshy’ songs of our nonselves—composing, in Howe’s phrase from My Emily Dickinson, “an ugly verse,” and—how beautiful!—they have persisted. -Heidi Lynn Staples, The Georgia Review

She scrolls across the page with careful distance and deliberation, a constancy that remains unbroken, as Szymaszek writes in “Late Spring Journal,” “‘no news is good news’/as a policy/doesn’t work for me.”  …  To receive a memento of what it was like in 2013 to be here, amid a HopStopped, cupcake-frenzied Manhattan is to also engrave your name in the sidewalk and claim your experience of witness: what’s lost or abandoned, what’s already left us—and what stays. Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals, as it follows an arc made tragic by the deaths of two beloved animals, becomes a project of endurance, a project for enduring. Every entry is a fragment that abandons punctuation and embraces the gerund where she is constantly moving, the euphoria and self-surprise of relating one’s life in the present tense. … To endure, Szymaszek seems to say, is also to care. And it is this role of poet as caretaker that seems most prominent, and most urgent, in 2017. The care of noticing is itself a literary construction and a protest or demonstration, and yet this is, at the outset, a neutral project, a text of pre-text, a project of pluralizing one’s private thoughts and feelings, the private made public and thus, political. —Chris Campanioni, The Brooklyn Rail

What is remarkable about …  seemingly routine moments — a train stops, someone panhandles, our writer sits on a park bench — that out of context feel like a Diane Arbus or Helen Levitt photo, is that while reading them, Szymaszek is enduring especially challenging and tragic moments, and in the midst of it, she still sees the world pass by with pinpoint precision. That is the mark of a poet, a real poet, an urban poet, a poet’s poet, a people’s poet — one who is living in the world while chronicling it, while rendering it poetic, while her own life unspools in a metaphoric stream of consciousness and crystal clarity. That’s the beautiful crux of this book.—Stephanie Gray, Jacket2

There is such an incredible immediacy to the quick notes in this collection, one that manages an intimacy while dispens[ing] with persona. … One could say that Szymaszek’s Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals exists as an exploration of the private and the public selves, writing on and around daily elements of internal and external being, from the meditative and the sublime to stretches of grieving and frustration to the mundane, routine and even magical, as she writes as part of “austerity measures”: “cut self / slack day // org. better / be sea- / worthy // five years / before / the mast [.]” Through such quick notes seemingly, and deceptively, jotted down into these accumulated narratives, they begin to provide intriguing portraits of this semi-fictional “Stacy,” in these, as she calls them, forms of “poetic journalism.” —Rob McClennan

Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?: I enjoy giving readings and find them useful for figuring out what’s working and what’s not. Reading from “Journal of Ugly Sites” has been especially gratifying because I’ve felt the audience with me in way I haven’t before. It’s parts of my life through an ugly lens; death/loss, things going wrong with my body, situations at home, at work, in the world – it feels risky to put it out there, but it’s also comedic and I like to deliver it kind of like a monolog. I want to dare you to relate to me. When the audience recognizes this, it’s an adrenaline rush. I don’t even get those when I work out at the gym.—Interview, “12 or 20 (second series) questions with Stacy Szymaszek”