Famous Hermits, my sixth full length collection, will be published by Archway Editions in June 2021. It features cover art by KB Jones, a piece I knew was the perfect image for FM at first sight. It’s a watercolor entitled “Women in Surrealism.” Check out her work! I’m really excited to be working with this new press and be part of the catalog they are building.
Cover: KB Jones
Also, Lucy Ives, Fred Moten, and Edwin Torres have given it their kind words of endorsement. The book will be distributed by Simon & Schuster. It has a page here.
The latest work from poet STACY SZYMASZEK, author of A YEAR FROM TODAY.
In Famous Hermits, her sixth full-length poetry collection, Stacy Szymaszek departs from the annual journal form of her past three books yet still adheres to the belief that the potential for revelatory and revolutionary transformation exists in the power we have, when we claim autonomy, to organize the fabric of our day to day lives. Her New York City is present as a memory that interjects its expectations onto new Western and Southwestern landscapes that don't recognize its logic. The concept of the famous hermit is born out of a desire to experience integrity, to not go forgotten, yet with a fierce need to separate from liberal ideas of what poetry should publicly perform. She invokes other kindred artists such as Dante, Bob Kaufman, Tina Modotti, and Jean Seberg as guides as she writes her own statements of renunciation and ultimately of middle-aged self-love.
“Sometimes all it takes is becoming a hermit. Continuing her exploration of the poem-as-diary with this new ecstatic collection, Stacy Szymaszek proves herself a glorious master of the aphorism, the bon mot, and the scintillating image. Somewhere between memory and shouting for joy are these lines. ”
“We have no choice but to love our lyricism hungry, insistent and outgoing in withdrawal. It has to sound like something as it rounds the corner, down the steps and through the park into a broken city left behind for chaparral. Famous Hermits is a book about how we share necessity through sequestration, moving for love, if we can. Made by a poet who loves poetry, it makes a beautiful argument for poetry. Szymaszekal music won’t stop midstride, midlife, midline, and we have to love that. ”
“The poems in Famous Hermits take surface narrative and give it deep glide, that deeper dive that happens when you approach the world as your confidante. Within a few lines, Stacy Szymaszek interlaces eons worth of intricate history to galvanize a poet’s hangout — “I writhe / I am a human I think.” There is tenderness in the assimilation of being human, to write the savage heart with a poet’s restraint. In these pages, Basho meets the collective aporia — “my body takes me on a ride / I effloresce” — to enter a synesthetic space, where each allegory is its own parsed quench. Szymaszek shows her mastery of line and form by encapsulating cinematic propulsions that glint, in a flash, to then come back to our daily dialogue. Infiltrating cohesion with density, and a razor sharp wit, the poet’s “elite city” appears as a temporal embrace in the heat of a desert, an emodiment of our migratory needs. What do we hold back, that may emote us, to enter, with simultaneity, our understanding of each other—of people, of poem—where all entrances are lived, all recollected stanzas othered? This richly focused collection explores our diurnal awakenings as cognitive planes, where each grouping of text is a radial entity, a hermetic investigation of a poet’s walk.”
KB Jones, Women in Surrealism