Bos Books

Bos Books is a one-of-a-kind collection inspired by my obsessions: experimental poetry, poetics and related literature, nature and agriculture, art and the art of simply being. “Bos” (Latin for cow) reflects my connection with these fascinating creatures, who I have the honor of spending many hours with and am writing about. They've gently nudged me to create and share this selection of books. Many I have gathered from across the Hudson Valley, and many are from the personal libraries of me and my poet partner, Kimberly Alidio.

Bos Books currently resides at C. Cassis in Rhinebeck, NY thanks to the owner, liqueur maker, and poet Rachael Petach. They are on hiatus for the winter so check back in the Spring!

Donna the cow drawn by SS

Starving Is the Energy to be published by Antiphony Press, late 2025

Grateful to Ann Pedone at Antiphony for wanting to publish my long poem Starving Is the Energy. It’s length is between a chap and a book - so maybe a booklet.

Starving is the Energy explores the body, work, technology, and memory, weaving vivid details and moments of humor with reflections on music, literature, and philosophy. Influenced by the works of Antonin Artaud, John Clare, Julian of Norwich, and others, it considers the realities of illness, identity, and mortality while searching for meaning in the tension between life’s tenderness and its harshness. The farm where Szymaszek works grounds the narrative in sensory experiences: the smell of manure and fur, the feel of a curry comb in hand, the sight of a cow's damaged horn. These physical moments provide a connection to cycles of life and death, care and renewal. Recurring images, like cows flicking their horns or leaning into a touch, act as refrains that echo throughout the text, inviting contemplation of how small gestures can hold profound significance. Grooming the cows is both a task and an expression of connection and resilience, a way to push back against a world that often dehumanizes or demands conformity. Through these simple, tactile acts, the work transforms labor into a practice of mutual care, recognition, and quiet healing.

On Stacy Szymaszek’s Famous Hermits by Courtney Bush in Annulet

Midway along the journey of her life, a poet and beloved director of the Poetry Project leaves New York City. Though the poems in her new book Famous Hermits (Archway Editions, 2022) are not explicitly in Szymaszek’s signature annual journal form, they do not abandon her field of mastery: the diaristic recording of everydayness as a field for insight, revelation, and moments of pure beauty (or what beauty looks like to me), like the “elder woman” who appears in “Stop Making Peace” to sell her handmade soap, her voice suddenly lineated and descending the page:

                    

                        mine has more

                                                            pine tar

                                    in it

                                                            because frankly

                                    I am

                                                            a master

                                                                                    of my trade (41)

Read the whole review here.

On Famous Hermits - Review of Famous Hermits by Will Fesperman in Social Text

“In the fall of 2023, it is a bit late to be reviewing Stacy Szymaszek’s Famous Hermits, which came out months ago. But that does not matter so much. In fact, there are parts of Famous Hermits that seem already posthumous. I wouldn’t write that in a review (for fear of sounding morbid), except that Szymaszek said it themselves, in an interview with Sallie Fullerton. To write posthumously means to write for a wider audience than your peers: dead, alive, and future people. That means you have to cast off the provincialism of some US poets, who are so fixated on their US lineages that they forget about the rest of the world.”

Read the whole review here.

Stacy Szymaszek on the Liberatory possibilities of outsider poetry

Read the conversation between me and Sallie Fullerton here.

“The titular poem in Stacy Szymaszek’s new collection Famous Hermits begins with a quote by Agnes Martin, delivered at a Poetry Project talk in 1980. “I know that you’ve been conditioned to…become famous, and make your mark, and all that kind of thing, but you won’t go very far…” Though it appears halfway through the book, the statement settles over the poems like a portentous cloud. A moment of shared recognition and complicity. The poet, however, seems to have already given this idea quite a bit of thought.”

Three Novenas published by auric press

Visit auric’s site to order.

2022
hand-bound softcover, 6.5 x 4.75 in
58 pages, edition of 200
$13

special edition of 26 chapbooks, signed and lettered
with purple covers and a 9 x 5 in broadside 
letterpressed by Wry Press - $40

The Privilege of Thinking published in the New York Times Magazine

“Stacy Szymaszek’s “The Privilege of Thinking” borrows its title from the poem of the same name by the filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. In both poems, the terrain of thought is the shared space of this world, its landscapes and social conditions. Illumination is no one-way street. Thinking doesn’t radiate solely from the depths of the individual mind, but as Pasolini writes, “there’s light/in the world all around.” In Szymaszek’s poem, thinking in the city — eked out in scraps of survival-inflected time — reflects the city’s qualities: those of motion and vigilance, even a kind of gentle arrogance. But the city is a past-tense place. The present of the poet is in the desert, where a newfound stillness issues its own stark reply.” Selected by Anne Boyer

Read the poem here.

Illustration by R. O. Blechman

Illustration by R. O. Blechman

Famous Hermits Playlist

Largehearted Boy invited me to share a playlist of music that influenced the writing of Famous Hermits. I found it a cool approach to memoir.

TWO REVIEWS OF THE PASOLINI BOOK

Review of THE PASOLINI BOOK in The Poetry Project Newsletter by Becca Teich

“Amidst the upsurge in use of terms such as “babyqueer” or “tenderqueer” which one could say infantilize adults and lower expectations for mature behavior due to a sort of social infancy, Szymaszek inverts the paradigm of the childish adult to reveal the unique nonconformity of the adult-like child. The nonlinear interplay between childhood, gender nonconformity, and queerness reveals this cruel world in which such children are viewed as “both a threat and in need of protection” while simultaneously obscuring and denying children’s autonomy—an all too relevant insight in the midst of the current fascistic onslaught against trans children.” from “On The Pasolini Book by Stacy Szymaszek”

Review of THE PASOLINI BOOK by Giulia Crispiani on NERO.

“In The Pasolini Book, Rome and reality are indeed suspended in Stacy’s memory of it—a non-phenomenological experience driven by the desire to remember everything of a life that is made of two, that is lived by two bodies in two different fragments of a linear vector of time. When he dies, she doesn’t know—only later will she value the relevance of that specific event, she’ll come back to mourn and celebrate that life, she’ll borrow his moves and return to those places to become that man. This is what writing can do—because writing doesn’t fear time.” from “STACY AFTER PIER PAOLO On Stacy Szymaszek’s The Pasolini Book”

The Pasolini Book - official pub-date april 15

order your copies now directly from Golias Books!

“This is a strong and sure book of poetry. Like a city, it is deeply inviting and expansive at every corner. Yet it also provides a solace I didn’t know I needed: as a series of moments and movements toward a queer genealogy. For it is a problem for us, people of the body, that everything disappears, including our ancestors. How can we connect to our blistering and lost history, or speak fully of the curled shame and its sex? The Pasolini Book is a complex sensate record of the poem as location through which life, especially queer life, surges and withdraws. Enter this book as if you are together walking with Szymaszek and Pasolini: enter the smooth stream of the body across time. These poems are not frames for the lost but sites for their reoccurrences; the past hasn’t disappeared – it has become the present.”
— Camille Roy

Video from Majolica Poetry Reading

November 15, 2021 | Wayne Koestenbaum, Sally Wen Mao, S*an D. Henry Smith, Stacy Szymaszek.

We were all commissioned to write a poem in response to the exhibit of Majolica at the Bard Graduate Center. The poem I write is called The Serpent. I read it at about 11:45 on the video.

92Y workshop

Advanced Poetry with Stacy Szymaszek

Mon, Mar 28, 2022 - Mon, Apr 18, 2022
6:30 pm - 9 pm ET

One of my favorite ways to think about poetry is “an art of sounds moving in time,” to quote Karl Shapiro.

In this workshop, we’ll read and write poems with an eye toward the ear. How can we expand sonic presence in our poems to register another layer of meaning in sound’s own right? We’ll read poems aloud and listen to recordings of poets reading. The atmosphere will be supportive of discussion, and experimentation in your own sense of prosody.

Students are chosen by Stacy Szymaszek on the basis of a manuscript submission. Applications must be received by Monday, February 28, at 5 pm. View the submission guidelines. Scholarship assistance is available. Applications must be returned to Scholarship Services at least two weeks before the first session.

The Pasolini Book

Golias Books is pleased to announce

New Releases for 2022

We are very happy to announce two new publications for 2022: Matt Longabucco's Heroic Dose and Stacy Szymaszek's The Pasolini Book. We received our largest and strongest pool of submissions ever this summer, and we've spent the last several months reading, rereading, and discussing quite a number of excellent projects; thank you so much to everyone who shared their work. In the end, we were thrilled to find in Stacy's and Matt's manuscripts not only a good fit for Golias but the kind of sustained attention, strong conceptual and genealogical architecture, and care for the felicity of individual words that any press would be lucky to publish.

Longabucco's Heroic Dose collects longer poems and serial works into an extended journey in which lyric and critical reflections collocate a range of social geographies and milieus, narrative temporalities and mythic histories, into a richly guided passage through our ongoing contemporary underworld. Szymaszek's The Pasolini Book documents a nearly two-decade engagement with the "civic poetry" of Pier Paolo Pasolini and a two-fold cultivation of identity and vocation through the daily work of language and the re-visionary creation of one's own intellectual and political precursors. Suffice it to say that we were deeply impressed by both projects' combination of intellectual rigor and commitment with a clear and contagious enjoyment of words, thoughts, and images that make each line a springboard for one's own inquiry.

We offer our warmest thanks and congratulations to Stacy and Matt, and we look forward to making these books available next year.

Please stay tuned for more information on release dates and readings, and as always, thank you all for your support of the press. Feel free to take a look at our books here, and consider ordering one or more of the excellent titles from our back catalogue that you may have missed or that might make a good gift in the upcoming months. 
 

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of the full-length books Emptied of All Ships (2005), Hyperglossia (2009), hart island (2015), Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), which won the Ottoline xPrize from Fence Books and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2017, A Year From Today (2018) and Famous Hermits (forthcoming). Once the director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church (2007–18), Szymaszek is now a nonprofit arts consultant and teacher, living in the Hudson Valley region of New York. Szymaszek's work was recognized with a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant in Poetry. She serves on the boards of Wendy's Subway and The Committee on Poetry.

Matt Longabucco is the author of M/W: An essay on Jean Eustache’s La maman et la putain (Ugly Duckling Presse 2021). His chapbooks include Athens Notebook and The Sober Day. Poems and essays have appeared recently in Mirage, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing, innovative pedagogy, and critical theory at New York University and at Bard College’s Institute for Writing & Thinking.

photo by Venn Daniel

Richard Avedon | Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1966

Some Recent Publications

Read a new interlocution entitled “Babies with Fire Eyes Forever” between me and poet/translator Carlos Lara in Nomaterialism. Issues aren’t archived so I’ll upload a PDF here. But it’s a great issue so read it while you can.

Read an old interlocution entitled “Time Bandits” between me and Brenda Coultas over at The Poetry Project. Thank you to the team there.

Poems in The Tiny. Thank you to editors Gina Myers and Emma Brown Sanders.

Poems in Prolit. Thank you to editor Patrick Blagrave.

Not to neglect the print journals:

Poems in The Canary issue 7. Thank you to Joshua Edwards, Lynn Xu, Nick Twemlow, and Robyn Schiff.

A poem in Castle Grayskull but I can’t tell you where to find it.

Video from Segue Readings Series

Segue Reading Series: Charles Theonia & Stacy Szymaszek. October 16, 2021, Artists Space. Curated and hosted by Lonely Christopher and Venn Daniel. With thanks to James Sherry.

Video is here. I read a new poem entitled “Three Novenas.” My segment starts at about 57:26.

Video from Fahrenheit 451 House reading

Reading with Brenda Coultas and Martina Salisbury on June 12, 2021 for “Unwalled,” an exhibition of works by photographer Corinne May Botz, poet Brenda Coultas and installation artist Elana Herzog. Video set to start with Brenda introducing me. I read two poems from The Pasolini Book.

GAM as an Experiment in Gift Exchange

Nearly 14 years ago to the day I talked to students at SUNY Buffalo about my poetry mag GAM. I expanded those ideas in an essay for publication in the first issue of Wild Orchids (Melville issue), edited by Robert Dewhurst and Sean Reynolds - check out WO here. Still as true more true ever true: “but the crew of the Pequod doesn’t actually have a proper gam. Ahab’s obsession limits the exchange of information to “Have ye seen the white whale?” #anticapitalism #mutualaid

GAM AS AN EXPERIMENT IN GIFT EXCHANGE (The following talk was given to a small group of students at Buffalo State in 2007.) "GAM. Noun-A social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships, generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats' crews: the two captains remaining for a time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other."

GAM_szymaszek.jpg