Hart Island

Author: Stacy Szymaszek

Publisher: Nightboat Books (2015)

In Hart Island, the poet narrator walks and works in the East Village of Manhattan navigating the day to day needs and desires of a community, an organization, a changing neighborhood, as well as her own. The poem, which begins after she discovers the existence of an appropriated, politically walled-off potter’s field/prison, proposes that others are not figurative or metaphorical, but are literal, material―that alterity can be both a limit and radiance.  

“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