"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 Schmaltzs 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 silences 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 languages 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 intentionsa 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 Duchamps 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
