Segue Introduction for Stacy Szymaszek
Stacy Szymaszek is the author of Emptied of All Ships (Litmus Press, 2005). Recent chapbooks include Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane (Faux Chaps, 2008) and from Hyperglossia (Hot Whiskey, 2008). Hyperglossia, the complete poem, is just out from Litmus Press in 2009.

In her new book Hyperglossia, a key text for our time, Stacy Szymaszek embarks upon a multi-persona allegorical narrative whose serial variations embody sound and experience: "trap earth neath pater." Fragments of partially swallowed diction allow several (possibly contradictory) realities to manifest themselves simultaneously. The reader is interpellated among linguistic fragments as sounds dispersed in composition by field, a textual body whose "larynx / is a mimic." A transgender-tending self is simultaneously negated and multiplied through alternating moments of empathy and critique. Szymaszek's third person avatar Eustace is a sympathetic sort, a public persona with his own foibles which map equally the poet's interiority and the reader's projections about what he might correspond to, reminding us that the interior is always public, and that public language is always creating an interior. The lavender pirate flag of this you-stance becomes both a "shroud" and a "splendid tour," and the fluidity of its anagram ("a cut see," "ate cues," "sauce et") truly manifests as "an ailment I will fight with." We're pleased to welcome Stacy Szymaszek to the Segue Reading Series today