Samuel Ace,Maureen Seaton
Stealth, this reeling motet by poets Maureen Seaton & Sam Ace, feels like a Tarkovsky film, all of them strung together, about the end of the world, these poems continuously spilling themselves into other spaces ad infinitum. And giving us a tiny window on that. It feels like a shell-game. Friendship and language. Stealth is excited and joyous, while dying, dragging oneâ€™s tired ass through a desert, hallucinating. It feels like The Wasteland but the footnotes are fun. Stealth is more boy than girl. I donâ€™t think Philip Marlowe, I think of Philip Whalen with a pilotâ€™s silk scarf tied around his neck. Man or a girlâ€™s doll. These multiples never get solved, only raised here. I think I mean that stealth is simply the past tense of steal or living finally with everything you stoleâ€”living well in a paradise of your own. â€” Eileen Myles,Ace and Seaton define stealth as the ability to â€œwitness without being seen.â€ It is a phantom state, even a statelessness, enviable until the point that the subject realizes that he or she must pay the price by kissing agency goodbye. In a series of miraculously suggestive poems, the authors problematize the human invisible, using the dreamscapes of Brigadoon, Fantasia, and the painter Agnes Martin to take us there. Stealth is a book of passingâ€”passing for straight, passing for black or white, male or female, passing unobserved, ignored, yet despised. It is a heartbreaking book, an angry one, and yet one that enchants and elevates with its manufactured â€œjungleâ€”somewhere safe to hideâ€”frond by frond.â€ â€” Kevin Killian
Poetry,LGBT,Transgender,GLBT,Queer
Stealth