Lambda Literary on Stacy Szymaszek's A Year From Today

At Lambda Literary, Dale Smith reviews Stacy Szymaszek's A Year From Today (Nightboat Books, 2019). "If the diary can be understood as a vehicle of self-scrutiny, then it is so here, though the terms of that temperamental quest are only suggested, allowed to separate from the arrival of one perception into the next," writes Smith. More:

Self-interruption, jagged entries, fugitive reflections—these contribute to the ongoing assembly of self and identification that the daybook form allows. Pasolini’s The Divine Mimesis, published in Italy shortly after his death, draws directly from Dante, acknowledging the dark wilderness of midlife, when passion and ideology refract, disintegrating the self into a collaborative fiction. His is a spiritual meditation on conditions of language, place, identity, and history. Szymaszek’s identification with the queer Italian poet-filmmaker opens new directions, new ways of seeing his life and, by contrast, her own. This affinity brings to mind several questions relevant to the daybook’s form. Like, what is it to be connected to an idea, memory, image, or person through time? How does the past, one’s own and the cultural history one constantly negotiates, inform the experience of the present, or lead to an increase in our capacities to transform one moment into the next? The poet’s likes and dislikes are really just accidents of person. But poetry locates those personal affections and remakes them into portals through which readers explore and compare their own pathways and conditionings... 

Read on at Lambda Literary.