Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals

by Stacy Szymaszek

Stacy Szymaszek's free-range attention is fixed on what is just underfoot and just in the line of the replete objects of homely desire, homely repulsion. Beloved dying dog, worthy work, relational obligation, self-entertainment, an anxious curative. In the tradition of the New York School of dailiness and relative effervescence, this work brings a timely recasting of contemporary attachments. it's a sauna in here

dancer sweat entering
humanity's glands// Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Stacy Szymaszek is author of the collections Emptied of All Ships (2005) and Hyperglossia (2009). Szymaszek is artistic director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2015

Reviews

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems as long lists of mundane grotesqueries whose sublimation occurs through being noticed and noted. Cleaning up a dying pet's bloody stool, insignificant interactions with neighbors, petty domestic vignettes, encounters with New York City's ambient trash heaps: all are provided with an apotheosis through the aesthetic. The title of this collection is honest about its contents, though it also serves to obscure. Journal of Ugly Sites offers more than just the voyeurism of a furtive flip through another's diary. In wading through the piles of Szymaszek's experience of her world's daily failings, her struggles with the small self-hatreds of depression, and the numbing ambivalence and unremarkableness of death's reality, I am brought to moments of exhaustion in which I recognize the emotional entropy characteristic of contemporary life. The virtue of these poems is expressed in the tension between the fact that much of our everyday life seems not worth noticing and the fact that we notice it anyway. Stacy Szymaszek's beautiful reportage does not disingenuously play at truth through description of the external, but burrows down deep to where the only truth possible really resides: in the attempt at an honest and skillful account of one's experiences, deftly arrayed.

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

sounds dumb but whenever i read stacy szymaszek, i wish the book could just keep going... reading her life parallel to mine ... this book makes me feel less alone in the world. keeping a journal of ugly sites (a journal prompt from bernadette mayer) is an infectious strategy to archive daily exterior findings and thoughts and connections, (to keep ourselves), and to uplift "daily life" as art, as moving us. the "anus beef" restaurant is noticed on one end, and then closes down on another. the poems are long like years, the overwhelming strangeness of experience.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

so much
detail [ ]
commendable micro memory recovery
A strong Altoids effect

[Tom Buchanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciated how she can identify Haribo candy whips, no packaging required.