Stacy Szymaszek

2005 • 96 pp. • $12.00 • ISBN: 0-9723331-6-9
Cover art by Brenda Iijima

• EOAGH #4 review by Julian T. Brolaski. 2008.
• Xantippe review by Denise Nico Leto. double issue 2006-2007.
• Jacket 28 review by Laura Sims. 2005.
• Cross-Cultural Poetics interview with Leonard Schwartz. #146.
• Every Other Day interview with Kate Greenstreet.
• Just Buffalo Small Press reading. March 15, 2007.

Stacy Szymaszek places her readers in a border situation. Here is a poetics of extreme condensation. "ink a hinge here/ ‘n here/ ‘n mother/ make me limber." Where traces are, lines remain. Magic is implicated in every shot and countershot. This is idiosyncratic and stunning work.

—Susan Howe

Each poem is what I am looking for: a resonance with a particular location, an intelligence unafraid of its humanity, a sort of desperate adequacy with the people or objects that Szymaszek encounters.

—Etel Adnan

Emptied of All Ships is a setting out into crucial waters. Each word here has its own weight and position—its own vital movement between poles of loss and discovery. With our sight-lines thus widened, the observance itself becomes activated—another mode of transport. A poetry of brevity is a tough task (especially the word-as-line), but in these pages it registers as achievement.

—George Albon

These stanza-pearls are dressed in tight corsets emulating a Roman, masculine brevity. Her use of craft ("last to touch / your craft") tells us shucks we are outside the law...

—Julian T. Brolaski, in EOAGH #4, 2008

To read Emptied of All Ships is to enter an unfixed universe of ideas with taut internal logic, multiple shifts in perspective, syntactic gaps, and a strapping, nearly epic synechdoche. It is a world where sensual juxtapositions abound and elude keeping the reader off balance. The form is at once conrete and motion-filled... Sections of the book are themselves indeterminate (as the table of contents goes), but in the actual text there is a new work of visual art between each. Many of the images contain a spidery script, indecipherable symbols, or a hint of calligraphy that directs the reader's attention to the possibility that the letters that make up the words in the text are themselves interpretive hinges that can release manifold signification. These drawings throughout the book act as cartography to mark our way through the unsettled whole, while Brenda Iijima's ghostly and panoramic cover art brings us right into the vortex of water's creative and destructive force.

—Denise Nico Leto in Xantippe 4/5, Double issue 2006-2007

Her lines may be tightly controlled, stripped down to the minimum, but they allow for largesse of interpretation as bountiful, fluid, and full of inherent contradictions as the sea itself...

—Laura Sims in Jacket 28, October 2005

The publication of this book is made possible, in part, by support from: