Edited by Nasser Hussain. Afterword by Orchid Tierney. Available to order here.
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.
Praise
“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, author of Read Me
“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, author of The Ritualites and Conviviliaties
“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, author of Selected Variations for Bees
Eric Schmaltz 