meet me there: Normal Sex & home in three days. don’t wash.
Stealth - Samuel Ace and Maureen Seaton
"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
Cover of HOME IN THREE DAYS. DON’T WASH. 1st edition, Hard Press
Cover of NORMAL SEX 1st edition, Firebrand Books
"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