Famous Hermits

The latest work from poet STACY SZYMASZEK, author of A YEAR FROM TODAY. 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. --Edwin Torres, The Body In Language: An Anthology (ed)