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Starving is the Energy, Stacy Szymaszek

Starving is the Energy explores the body, work, technology, and memory, weaving vivid details and moments of humor with reflections on music, literature, and philosophy. Influenced by the works of Antonin Artaud, John Clare, Julian of Norwich, and others, it considers the realities of illness, identity, and mortality while searching for meaning in the tension between life’s tenderness and its harshness. The farm where Szymaszek works grounds the narrative in sensory experiences: the smell of manure and fur, the feel of a curry comb in hand, the sight of a cow's damaged horn. These physical moments provide a connection to cycles of life and death, care and renewal. Recurring images, like cows flicking their horns or leaning into a touch, act as refrains that echo throughout the text, inviting contemplation of how small gestures can hold profound significance. Grooming is both a task and an expression of connection and resilience, a way to push back against a world that often dehumanizes or demands conformity. Through these simple, tactile acts, the work transforms labor into a practice of mutual care, recognition, and quiet healing.

“not / the / ob / sta / cle” begins the epic record of lyric encounters where an anacrusis and a “dread” MRI become a Pandora’s box. The unexpected cadences of “earthly concerns” with their untimely timed consequences and foils propel Stacy Szymaszek’s long poem Starving is the Energy. The ghost notes of throbbing “numb thumb” tune to the “boom,” a coming out where survival is the arrival. Quiet intensity blasts “I know it’s serious.” Barbellion’s trick is distraction as contemplation: the body remembers. The simple clarity of this aphoristic wisdom poem declares “there is no borrowed time.” In this work of compelling electric tension, Szymaszek’s compassion completes incantatory lines, “alive? alive / every part of her.”

—Norma Cole

Radiant and sharp like a “freak warm day in a cold late spring” – Szymaszek is the poet of the queer quotidian, the interspecist & intertextual. Starvingis the energy of these chronicles of extraction: day-labor with the ever dripping “dum dum” of crumbs, “our chronic dearth”, the poetic line. This is the language of being a body in our times, the touch of a human standing next to you / next to the open flame alive.

—Noah Ross

The moving parts of day-to-day experience are brought to life in these poems as plastic, bony, spongy, furry, belching, or rubbery characters, and their tragicomedy is a captivating watch. The poet’s eye hangs back, respectfully, from the friends to whom it pays tribute—cows, dogs, fellow 9-5ers, artists living or dead—in a subdued yet unconditional love letter to the entropic animal’s plight of death-in-life. “starving is the energy / that brings me to this bounty” is a pronouncement ruefully accepting the abundance of perpetual change; the not-quite-ecstatic “moving but motionless” whirl of all bodies. A haunting, halting poetry that’ll stick in your head like the heavy post-punk banger to which you imagine yourself dancing.

—Miriam Atkin

After a long, lonely winter one day I walked into Woodland Pattern, and everything was different; Stacy Szymaszek had arrived. Since then, she has built a center of energy here in Milwaukee that sustains many of us. And she went on to greater things in the world beyond that. Today she is a guiding star for many here and elsewhere. Her lines are sharp and still with inner movement. Silence builds for her in meaning. The seeds of poetry she planted now sprout in our new spring beyond Apocalypse. Pure water trickles through Starving Is The Energy. Our hunger is fulfilled through its reflections.

—Roberto Harrison

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of nine books of poetry, including Starving is the Energy and Essay. They are the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry, and are a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. They enjoy teaching and mentoring younger poets and have done both in a wide variety of contexts, including, recently, for the “ESB” Fellowship program they founded at The Poetry Project in 2013. They live in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley on the sacred homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people, who, due to forced removal, reside in Northeast Wisconsin as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. They enjoy swimming and spending time with cows and other animals.

Excerpts may be found at Noir Sauna and Antiphony: a journal and press.

Starving is the Energy, Stacy Szymaszek

Starving is the Energy explores the body, work, technology, and memory, weaving vivid details and moments of humor with reflections on music, literature, and philosophy. Influenced by the works of Antonin Artaud, John Clare, Julian of Norwich, and others, it considers the realities of illness, identity, and mortality while searching for meaning in the tension between life’s tenderness and its harshness. The farm where Szymaszek works grounds the narrative in sensory experiences: the smell of manure and fur, the feel of a curry comb in hand, the sight of a cow's damaged horn. These physical moments provide a connection to cycles of life and death, care and renewal. Recurring images, like cows flicking their horns or leaning into a touch, act as refrains that echo throughout the text, inviting contemplation of how small gestures can hold profound significance. Grooming is both a task and an expression of connection and resilience, a way to push back against a world that often dehumanizes or demands conformity. Through these simple, tactile acts, the work transforms labor into a practice of mutual care, recognition, and quiet healing.

“not / the / ob / sta / cle” begins the epic record of lyric encounters where an anacrusis and a “dread” MRI become a Pandora’s box. The unexpected cadences of “earthly concerns” with their untimely timed consequences and foils propel Stacy Szymaszek’s long poem Starving is the Energy. The ghost notes of throbbing “numb thumb” tune to the “boom,” a coming out where survival is the arrival. Quiet intensity blasts “I know it’s serious.” Barbellion’s trick is distraction as contemplation: the body remembers. The simple clarity of this aphoristic wisdom poem declares “there is no borrowed time.” In this work of compelling electric tension, Szymaszek’s compassion completes incantatory lines, “alive? alive / every part of her.”

—Norma Cole

Radiant and sharp like a “freak warm day in a cold late spring” – Szymaszek is the poet of the queer quotidian, the interspecist & intertextual. Starvingis the energy of these chronicles of extraction: day-labor with the ever dripping “dum dum” of crumbs, “our chronic dearth”, the poetic line. This is the language of being a body in our times, the touch of a human standing next to you / next to the open flame alive.

—Noah Ross

The moving parts of day-to-day experience are brought to life in these poems as plastic, bony, spongy, furry, belching, or rubbery characters, and their tragicomedy is a captivating watch. The poet’s eye hangs back, respectfully, from the friends to whom it pays tribute—cows, dogs, fellow 9-5ers, artists living or dead—in a subdued yet unconditional love letter to the entropic animal’s plight of death-in-life. “starving is the energy / that brings me to this bounty” is a pronouncement ruefully accepting the abundance of perpetual change; the not-quite-ecstatic “moving but motionless” whirl of all bodies. A haunting, halting poetry that’ll stick in your head like the heavy post-punk banger to which you imagine yourself dancing.

—Miriam Atkin

After a long, lonely winter one day I walked into Woodland Pattern, and everything was different; Stacy Szymaszek had arrived. Since then, she has built a center of energy here in Milwaukee that sustains many of us. And she went on to greater things in the world beyond that. Today she is a guiding star for many here and elsewhere. Her lines are sharp and still with inner movement. Silence builds for her in meaning. The seeds of poetry she planted now sprout in our new spring beyond Apocalypse. Pure water trickles through Starving Is The Energy. Our hunger is fulfilled through its reflections.

—Roberto Harrison

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of nine books of poetry, including Starving is the Energy and Essay. They are the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry, and are a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. They enjoy teaching and mentoring younger poets and have done both in a wide variety of contexts, including, recently, for the “ESB” Fellowship program they founded at The Poetry Project in 2013. They live in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley on the sacred homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people, who, due to forced removal, reside in Northeast Wisconsin as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. They enjoy swimming and spending time with cows and other animals.

Excerpts may be found at Noir Sauna and Antiphony: a journal and press.