The Sham Tapestry

The Sham Tapestry by Adam Stutz
Paperback, 76 pages
$14.95 + s/h

“What’s left after the aftermath of apocalypse? In this ‘pandemic of papercuts’ where ‘buildings breathe’ us, the empty bottles of late capitalism break even the remaining ‘small slash of evening.’ Adam Stutz’s smart, spare, elegiac poems shatter Whitmanian optimism and its collective I into a masochistic we– a conscious voice unafraid to invent adjectives to describe ‘unknowable futures.’ Stutz interrogates this self who longs to feel something in that numb and ‘tender psychosis of nowhere,’ where even pain may be a ‘desirable affliction.’ Recalling Williams’ variable stress and the bright shards of imagism, Stutz’s fragments mobilize into his version of beauty– a collective resistance that refuses resignation– even as it must ‘[hum] the tones of the ashes / we will become.”
– Alex Mattraw, author of Raw Anyone, We Fell Into Weather, and Small Siren

“The poems in The Sham Tapestry are like time-lapse photographs of rooms, city streets at night, thoughts, computer screens, and the body as it changes, all laid on top of each other and overlapping. Adam Stutz traces “the boxes/ of proximities/ in shuffle rising upwards,” revealing the motion inside and at the edges of stillness. His writing is existential, tender, and full of echoes and indentations. Here is a poet who listens faithfully to “the radio of the inner ear,” understanding that words and lines are reverberations of each other and something outside of language. There’s an elemental quality to these poems and an admirable exploration of the question of honesty in human relations.”
– Brent Armendinger, author of Street Gloss and The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying

“Adam Stutz is a musician of words. Sometimes grooving, sometimes stuttering, always precisely syncopated, his inevitably revealing phrases follows the turns and shocks and hidden pathways of the mind and its struggle to make satisfying connection with the world. He takes what’s inside (the head and heart, the beat) and tries with it to create places where it might be possible to breathe, to thrive, to develop meaningful connections with others in all their complexity, trouble, and possibility.”
– Mark Wallace, author of The End of America Book 8

The Sham Tapestry is available for order here!

Compunctions + Thefts

Compunctions + Thefts by Adam Stutz
Paperback, 86 pages
$13.95 + s/h

Compunctions + Thefts is a minimal, jagged book length poem that reads like the scattered shards of glass arranged into a pattern of compulsive thoughts & obsessions. These are sharp aphorisms outlining a map that imagines a city living under the skin of the speaker, drawing on the persistence of our collective unease in our hyper-connected world, noting a nostalgia for a time before that may or may not have existed, stealing what little time exists between the bookends of our lives, & battling the constant specters of cynicism, regret, & complacency.

The Scales by Adam Stutz.
ISBN-13: 978-1-7323992-0-4
Paperback, 72 pages
$14.00 + s/h

“In The Scales, Adam Stutz carves his name into the the desk, the cubicle daily matter of human space. Seeding the microtonal, pixilated dreamscape of the working drone with the precision of a miniaturist, Stutz labors to coax the thing from its thingness. Almost masochistic in its confrontation with our contemporary cultural anxiety, The Scales, tells us that, “everything / just beneath the skin / feels like an umlaut.” This is a cool debut for our frenetic moment.” – James Meetze, author of Dayglo (Ahsahta, 2011) and Phantom Hour (Ahsahta, 2016)

“Adam Stutz’s poetic magnificence here lies in his agile sense of humor and his ability to isolate an idea or an abstract object and enlarge it by making it small. Thus, his poetry operates more like a microphone inside of a microscope. He scrutinizes the unscrutinizable and amplifies the sonic impossible. Stutz’s The Scales is an enigma of clever inspection, a language with its own esoteric musical scale. His poetry begs us to slow down when we move through life too fast, to zero-in the grandeur of insignificanceness when we de-accelerate too rapidly, and to depart from the modern mind a quaintness for lexical acuity. His work makes language glad that it’s still (very much) alive.” – VI KHI NAO, author of Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016) and The Old Philosopher (Nightboat Books, 2016)

The Scales is now available for order from White Stag Publishing here and Amazon here!

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