Famous Hermits 

Stacy Szymaszek has assembled a rich collage in Famous Hermits. The poems move dizzyingly from descriptive scenes to remembered conversations to direct personal assertions, interspersed with quotes from poets as wide-ranging as Catullus and Cedar Sigo (who may be the “famous hermits” of the title). Szymaszek does it all with an unapologetically non-narrative style: “clearly I do things that are wrong / a story is what I will never give anyone / nonlinearity is my protection.” What emerges is nonetheless a compelling account of a person wrestling with middle age and her place—or non-place—in the world.

At the crux of this collection is Szymaszek’s fraught decision to leave New York City and enter into her own sort of hermitage, alternating between Montana and Arizona. The poet deftly articulates her internal conflicts around this move, especially as a woman and lesbian: “what is it to leave an elite / city of the world / where people go to succeed,” and later, “sociologists say social people live longer / but I wonder if this is true for women for whom camaraderie feels lethal.” While exploring themes of reclusiveness, the poems also show the speaker finding solidarity with a range of women―from the artisan craftspeople she encounters in markets to Christian and ancient figures, such as Saint Catherine, who are steeped in mythologies of exile. Szymaszek is wrestling here with a deeper conflict between responsibility and freedom—“I traded sense of outward purpose for autonomy”—and a desire to escape the “death drive” of capitalism and a barely sustainable livelihood as an academic in New York.

In the end, poetry itself is a kind of ultimate escape, which the poet admits frees her “from moral imperative.” Yet it is also in poetry, ironically, that her own sense of responsibility lies: “my primary concern is not / for you to relate to me but to honor me as a true other who is nonetheless / a real person / a real poetry.”