I want to start by sayinG

Cleveland State University Poetry Center

Samuel Ace’s I want to start by saying is a constellation of memory, personal and place-based histories, dailiness, repetition, art-making, and desire. Ace’s insistent titular phrase acts as drone and anchor—invocation and prayer—propelling the peripatetic narrator from Cleveland to New York to Tucson, western Massachusetts to Atlanta and back again, line by line. Part essay, part memoir, and part collage, Ace explores the difficulties of romance, childhood, betrayal, and writing, establishing each sentence as a location to begin anew; to utter, accrete, and break again.

Praise for I want to start by saying:

• “This collection is an inventive, original exploration of eros, creative process, and trans and queer geographies of family and home… Hello to a new cult classic.” —Oliver Baez Bendorf

• “Ace is a treasure, a true one-of-one—I’ll follow his ear anywhere.” —Kaveh Akbar

• “Ace’s simmering, hesitant, protective attention works to bear the weight of secrets passed unsaid.” —Sarah Minor  

• “Sam Ace takes on the phrase “I want to start” as metronome that turns daily reflections into mediations on longing and loss, memory and pleasure, luck, absence, and value… this book is trans at its core. It is homey, heartfelt, and utterly beautiful.” —Emerson Whitney

• “This book is an incantation for us to sing on the road to God.” —Rebecca Brown

excerpt from I want to start by saying at The Georgia Reivew

p o r t a l s

by Samuel Ace & Maureen Seaton

Ravenna Press, 2025

As individual poets, I already knew I would follow Samuel Ace and Maureen Seaton through any hole in any wall we might encounter. But what Portals has shown me (more accurately, what I have experienced here and there) is the exponential wonder of their co-found, co-created, co-labored world. Exquisitely disorienting, uproariously contemplative, and lush with the bright burn of history, this is not a world you can visit. It is a world that will inhabit you. It is a veil, a vein that can bead the ear with love. The publication of Portals after Maureen’s passing blesses us all with the chance to dance in the mouth of every volcano, to sleep in the streams and on the shores to gather the fantasia around [us] and jump. I’ll meet you out there. Together we can open into the after. – TC Tolbert, Gephyromania and The Quiet Practices

Sometimes the lore about collaboration is that it's additive: one plus one equals two--voices, perspectives, hearkenings. But when Samuel Ace and Maureen Seaton poem together, the effect is multiplicative and multitudinous: all the ones inside each one times all the ones inside the other--a string of brightly colored beads, a literary Rubik's cube, a singular book of infinite plenitude. Herein you'll find a testament to their witnessing of and reckoning with, among many other and othered things, invisible cloaks and 'the brutal feminine.' Herein you'll also find a paean to long friendship, queer solidarity, and an innovative demonstration of these poets' "flawless resiliency.” – Julie Marie Wade, The Mary Years, co-author with Denise Duhamel of The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose and co-author with Brenda Miller of Telephone: Essays in Two Voices

our weather our seA

Black Radish Books

(currently out of print from the publisher - to order signed copies, contact Charis Books)

Sam Ace's fourth collection reads, brilliantly, as a new and selected--even though these poems are fresh and just-here. This is because the book travels through so much of what we love about Ace's work: an intergenerational and sexually fluid map fashioned by a transgressive tenderness that seems to always-be-heading-somewhere. In this way, these poems are culminations towards a queer futurity. "I beg you to stay unformed," Ace writes, with what is now his classic voice, both a determined command and compassioned plea. For Ace, whose work and presence now spans decades of activism, lives and genders, this collection honors them all as a site of inquiry, community and, ultimately, celebration in the face of uncertainty. Bravo, maestro. Thank you, brother. -- Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds

The cadences are quiet, pretty, and insistent. The sounds are like mesquite leaves, repetitive

and delicate

                     celebratory. The book is celebratory.

This book is very beautiful.

Wrap-around line that can shade into prose and makes a true cognitive bend      the line break is there because it's not a "long line" being used but a wrap-around. Clausal, acknowledging Stein, in an overall similitude of texture the book is grand and as if from a different dimension or planet. You don't recognize everything there, but you know how to be there. -- Alice Notley, author of most recently, Certain Magical Acts

The poems in Samuel Ace’s Our Weather Our Sea orbit many great bewilderments—embodiment, desire, time, loss—but at the center of this expansive solar system of wonder is a presiding fascination with sound and language itself. Ace writes, “I want to forget / how to put words together,” and then he begins to offer some alternatives to the traditional order—words repel words across the page, sounds come together in dazzling, sensual new arrays to accommodate his commanding and unprecedented experience. The effect is astonishing. “The meanings change then change again,” he writes. In these poems, Ace has pulled our language, his aperture, wide enough to fit the whole scene. -- Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf

In ‘Our Weather Our Sea,’ Samuel Ace is onto something startlingly new, "growling and minty." In deconstructed epistolary forms, song cycles, and serial prose sequences, "arenas so soft," Ace makes his way via word-images, painterly phrases which are part visual, part linguistic, "the middle roads of half-mooned cherries." These poems cultivate an air of liminality or mystery which accrues as the musical composition unfolds. The changing lyrical self-knowledge in process, "threads of you a farm of threads," confronts us with experiences rendered strange but close-up, "Headlights / breathing / down my / neck some / big clothing," or revealed as intimate because of their linguistic oddity, "sticky with coasts." Ace's pan-gender prepositions play the heroes in this story, connecting different domains of experience, inverting meanings, recontextualizing, turning poignant, or partying on the head of a pin. In this "infinite slide through the river of identitude," gender is a bridge, and love is a preposition. -- Trace Peterson, author of Violet Speech and co-editor of Troubling the Line : Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics

meet me there: Normal Sex & home in three days. don’t wash.

Belladonna* Germinal Texts

The timely reissue of both these books is cause for rejoicing. I know no more moving evocation of a child’s interior life and spirited resistance than the poems in Normal Sex. Linda Smukler, like Samuel Ace, is a master of metaphor, and the trans child's brilliant acrobatics of imagination are nothing less than the key to his survival.

Home In Three Days. Don’t Wash. is a book of desire, as radical today as when it was first published. Nothing about it is coy or prurient. Utterly specific, it sings the brain on sex with a voice that's breathtakingly honest and exposed. It takes us home to the dream-dark source of poetry, the longing for wholeness.

The candor and depth of Samuel Ace's introduction, a dialogue between Linda and Sam, is a generous addition and in itself is an extraordinary contribution to trans literature. From first page to last, this book delivers news I've been craving. –– Joan Larkin

With Meet Me There, Sam Ace begins a new dialogue with the past, though it has long been his country—the way we embody and misunderstand it, long for it and desperately cast it aside. Meet Me There teems with violent honesty, beauty and horror, lust and stillness. An underground classic, it now radiates with added dimensions, a time-traveler, a crucial contemporary text. — Michelle Tea

The beautifully composed “author’s note” tells us that even though Linda Smukler began gender-related therapy in 1997 and began physical transition in 2000—in other words, after both these books were originally published—it would be wrong to omit either Smukler or Samuel Ace from author credit, now that Belladonna* has so brilliantly reissued them, bound together for the first time. Writing as a gender nonconforming woman desiring other women fiercely, and writing through a “lost boyhood” with the power of a great novelist, Smukler astonished all of us who read this writing hot off the press; twenty years later it retains the heat, not only of sexual possession but of clear and definite speaking. “oh girl   I choose you  see?   It is ours to step forward   ours to heal the run of the wheel” In their note, the two authors reflect that this work was composed not in isolation but in the midst of a clutch of amazing women determined to write the truth about sex and thus, about life and work. The architectonics of these books seem even more remarkable from our present vantage point and will, I imagine, inspire generations of new poets and lovers and activists, long into the future. — Kevin Killian

The Ace of Spades represents the ancient spiritual hinge of transformation, but Samuel Ace transfigures or transforms to exalted beauty. One of my favorite literary minds, Ace's extraordinary new book lingers long enough along the horizon while waving that we catch the light to watch his limbs her life loved into. — CA Conrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

This re-release of Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. by Linda Smukler/Sam Ace is beautifully framed by a love letter between Sam and Linda: “Dear friend who is me and no longer me, dear love who I have never left behind.” Their exchange heralds the deep vulnerability these collections open, inviting the reader into their intimacies—from the shame of not being seen or understood, of being unsafe in a body, to moments of courage, fed largely by faith in the imagination, and the raw ecstasy of exploring gender and sexuality from childhood into adulthood. Sam writes to Linda, “In so many ways, your writing helped bring me into being.” I cannot help but feel I have been witness to the liminal stage of a sacred rite. — Eli Shipley

Stealth

Chax Press

"STEALTH, this reeling motet, 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 likeThe Waste Land 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

"1966: on my tiny teen phonograph I played the yellow Atco single, "When a Man Loves a Woman" till its grooves went faint, moved beyond words by it message of strength and passion through weakness and chains. Now Linda Smukler has re invented butch desire as a passionate amalgam of abjection, power and trembling knees. She knows the doubt and fear behind every stern visage the restless tugs of absence that surge beneath identity. Smukler is the Percy Sledge of lesbian butch femme. Cri-de-coeur écriture." – Kevin Killian

"There's a photograph in here that's hard to read at first. Then suddenly you see it's two, imposed on one another: portraits of Linda Smukler and Gertrude Stein. Stein hovers behind, above, beneath these brazen texts. Like her modernist forebear, Smukler uses the most direct and plain American idiom to render the complexity and anguish, and the humor of desire." – Rebecca Brown 

"The subject is sex--of these written things. I won't call them poems or prose, to tell you the truth I think it's secret speech gone public. Linda Smukler talks us through the rooms of sex, along telephone wires, to hotel rooms and rustic streets. And a terrifying absence looms alongside all its cagey fullness--the missed message, the desperation, the erratic fumblings towards orgasm or whatever. It's lesbian sex, lesbian speech, the bubbling details of a life lived and spoken, who has a job, is married, owns a dog, drinks juice and tea, drives a car and is utterly totally obsessed with sex. It's disturbingly true. If sex has a flag, this is it." – Eileen Myles