I Confess - by Eric Schmaltz (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

How is a lyric poem like a polygraph machine? A personal, poetic examination of the technology of truth-telling.

Eric Schmaltz's I Confess delves into the complexities of truth-telling in poetry, and the history of technologies designed to produce truth from willing and unwilling subjects, considering what it means to use a device - poetry or polygraph - to draw out one's most profound feelings and emotions.

Exploring the intersection of power, technology, and language, I Confess meditates on lie detection and its history, including trials by ordeal and pseudoscientific technologies. The poet then turns to his own personal experiences working with a lie detector and polygraph analyst. Taking himself as the central subject of the book, Schmaltz puts his subjectivity and positionality under scrutiny.

The answers to questions such as What does family mean to you? and Can you describe a time when you felt your best? inspire a range of forms from conventional lyrical verse to list poems to palindromes to visual poems. With an afterword by Orchid Tierney, I Confess is a personal, poetic document of truth's performance under duress.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

Eric Schmaltz is the author of Borderblur Poetics: Intermedia and Avant-gardism in Canada, 1963-1988 (University of Calgary Press) and Surfaces (Invisible Publishing), editor of Another Order: Selected Works of Judith Copithorne (Talonbooks), and co-editor of I Want to Tell You Love by bill bissett and Milton Acorn. His creative work has been published, exhibited, and performed nationally and internationally.