Stealth

by Samuel Ace (co-author), Maureen Seaton (co-author)

Stealth, this reeling motet by poets Maureen Seaton & Sam Ace, feels like a Tarkovsky film, all of them strung together, about the end of the world, these poems continuously spilling themselves into other spaces ad infinitum. And giving us a tiny window on that. It feels like a shell-game. Friendship and language. Stealth is excited and joyous, while dying, dragging one’s tired ass through a desert, hallucinating. It feels like The Wasteland but the footnotes are fun. Stealth is more boy than girl. I don’t think Philip Marlowe, I think of Philip Whalen with a pilot’s silk scarf tied around his neck. Man or a girl’s doll. These multiples never get solved, only raised here. I think I mean that stealth is simply the past tense of steal or living finally with everything you stole—living well in a paradise of your own. — Eileen Myles

Ace and Seaton define stealth as the ability to “witness without being seen.” It is a phantom state, even a statelessness, enviable until the point that the subject realizes that he or she must pay the price by kissing agency goodbye. In a series of miraculously suggestive poems, the authors problematize the human invisible, using the dreamscapes of Brigadoon, Fantasia, and the painter Agnes Martin to take us there. Stealth is a book of passing—passing for straight, passing for black or white, male or female, passing unobserved, ignored, yet despised. It is a heartbreaking book, an angry one, and yet one that enchants and elevates with its manufactured “jungle—somewhere safe to hide—frond by frond.” — Kevin Killian

Genres: Poetry, Transgender, Queer

88 pages

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Samuel Ace (formerly Linda Smukler) is a trans and genderqueer author of three collections of poetry: Normal Sex, Home in three days. Don’t wash., and most recently Stealth, with poet Maureen Seaton. He is also a visual artist and is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, a two-time finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and the National Poetry Series, winner of the Astraea Lesbian Writer’s Fund Prize in Poetry, The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry. His work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in or is forthcoming from Poetry, Aufgabe, Fence, The Atlas Review, Black Clock, Mandorla, Versal, The Collagist, Posit, Vinyl, Troubling the Line: Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, Best American Experimental Poetry 2016, and many other publications.