“The Pasolini Book documents the poet Stacy Szymaszek's engagement with the work of the Italian film director, poet, and political figure Pier Paolo Pasolini alongside her own evolving vocation as civic poet and dissenting subject within an American polis by turns hostile and hospitable. Extending the exploration of the temporally unbound, genderqueer, and disaster-prone persona of her earlier works, this volume collects two successive iterations of "felt translations," poem-for-poem rewritings, channelings, and détournements, of Pasolini's Roman Poems, undertaken over a decade apart. Separating the two suites of poems are three iterations of autofiction titled "A Sentimental Education," in which Szymaszek's Midwestern upbringing is re-centered and transformed through speculative identification with Pasolini. The Pasolini Book evidences a search for a civic poetry in which the poet does not contain multitudes so much as she exudes an abundant and experimental identity emerging from long experience seeking political and artistic solidarities on the margins of institutional life. "We are all in danger," Pasolini said in an interview only hours before he was murdered; today, in the midst of capitalist ruin, Szymaszek's poetry maps the particular pains of embattled artistic autonomy and the turbulent state of social and political community.” - Golias Books

The Pasolini Book is Stacy Szymaszek's sixth book of poetry. Her book Famous Hermits will also be published in 2022. She is the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry. From 2007 to 2018, she was the director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York City. She currently lives in the Hudson Valley, where she is an educator and a freelance consultant for arts and social justice nonprofits.

Golias Books, Durham, 2022

5” x 8”

160 pages