I Confess

"Eric Schmaltz’s I Confess plays in the intersection of testimony, confession and lyric address to explore how we come to know what we call truth. This is a work that doesn’t just ask what can be known, but how knowledge and vulnerability are shaped by mediating systems that claim authority over belief and evidence. Both Schmaltz and the lie detector measure truth based on what the body discloses that disembodied words alone cannot. Unlike a text message or DM, this work restores the value of sound to a material definition of poetic language by utilizing patterns in the voice and rhythms in the body. This in an age when the role that sound plays in the meaning of testimony, confession, and personal disclosure has never been more demoted by our writing technologies. Schmaltz’s latest book, therefore, could not be more timely as the need to challenge semblances of the real by critically engaging corporeal dimensions of language beyond the lettered word grows increasingly urgent." – Holly Melgard

"The poetry of Eric Schmaltz emanates from an ongoing collision between inscription and the body. It is raucous, ludic, vibratory. The ways in which I Confess shifts between otographic text and event score, performance documentation and lyric work make it a book to be uttered, investigated, inhabited. " – Michael Nardone

"In Eric Schmaltz’s I Confess the act of confessing invokes so much: bodies harrassed into speech by the imperatives of the state; technologies and folk beliefs that give confessions an aura of veracity; and the practice of poetry with its promise of a sophisticated truth. The remarkable feat of this book is that, on nearly every page, a bald truth would demystify, deflate and rob questions of their dignity and dimensionality. What precisely was your mother like? Who was the disciplinarian in your family? When was a time you felt your best? Are you telling me the truth? Through redactions, ambiguity, and art, mystery prevails." – Moez Surani, author of The Legend of Baraffo

"Eric Schmaltz is here to remind us that poetry is, actually, about having fun with form. I Confess is an exploration of performative utterances — an extensive polygraph that delves between truth and lies, memories and fantasy, that “unfurl in the festering of a wound”. “At the throat / forming under silence’s weight / learning to speak in timid tongue” — all this and more is documented in this part poetry book, part report, that has seen all and will tell all. I loved it! An inventive book of poetry which is highly engaging, intimate and packed with meaning."  – Astra Papachristodoulou

Praise for Surfaces:

“Surfaces is, as the book itself confesses, a catalogue of stimulations. It welcomes the saccade of the eyes, the gambits of a distracted neck, the swim of attention in the purr and drone of the ambient. […] In Surfaces, there is great pleasure in navigating an alphabetic labyrinth in a time of totalizing records of space— one derives from the dérive emotive pleasures of stark abstraction and indulgent design, the tenor of a dark line or the opulent aria of a gray-scale curve.” – Divya Victor, author of CURB

“In materializing language’s embodied ‘surfaces,’ Schmaltz returns words’ secrecy, reminding us that those inner meanings we seek are ultimately not inherent in them but in our own projected desires and intentions—a dangerous dynamic. The beauty of these forms arises in part from their refusal to come into focus. A surface, here, becomes not only a point of contact but of resistance.” – Amaranth Borsuk, author of The Book

“Surfaces reminds us that the page is a 3D object, each page the enactment of Duchamp’s infrathin. The language skims and streaks across the thinnest of sheens, a glistening moment, an uncanny reminder of what language could be, if only we let it.” – Derek Beaulieu, author of Surface Tension