Stealth by Samuel Ace

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