Overview

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.

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9781552455111

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Reviews

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, 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, 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, Surface Tension

Author Information

Eric Schmaltz is the author of Borderblur Poetics: Intermedia and Avant-gardism in Canada, 19631988 (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.

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