Overview

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.

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Reviews

"""In I want to start by saying, Samuel Ace brilliantly literalizes the performance of birth and rebirth--a litany of beginnings announce themselves as such, while the endings are as ubiquitous but never as loud. As in love, as in life. It's dizzying, propulsive work. Ace is a treasure, a true one-of-one--I'll follow his ear anywhere."" --KAVEH AKBAR ""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 ""I want to start by saying invites us to linger in the extraordinary, ordinary act of beginning. Through deliberate repetition, Sam Ace constructs an experimental essay that kaleidoscopes through time, with accumulative power reminiscent of Joe Brainard, yet forging a distinct presence, not just the what of what's remembered, but how. By embracing Gertrude Stein's rejection of mere repetition in favor of insistence, Ace turns language into a series of slides, the refrain ""I want to start by saying"" initiating us into contemplative peregrination. This collection is an inventive, original exploration of eros, creative process, and trans and queer geographies of family and home--and a moving plea to ""please stay alive."" Hello to a new cult classic."" --OLIVER BAEZ BENDORF ""In this gorgeous hybrid work, Samuel Ace tells and untells the story of a family for whom estrangement has become a tradition: ""I want to start by saying who was passed over. By whom. / I want to start by saying what was the art I saw. I want to start by saying my home and the mess of it."" Ace's careful hands fold and re-fold the known facts, weighing the pain of knowing against the risks of telling. ""I want to start by saying that the history I learned in school had no bones,"" Ace writes, ""I want to start by saying that the teachers at school did not talk to us about the city that was on fire. Like it wasn't our city. Or anyone's. Or that it didn't exist."" I want to start by saying is an accumulative record made of the light from Tucson, the greens of New England, and the yard-forests and gravel pits of Cleveland. Ace's simmering, hesitant, protective attention works to bear the weight of secrets passed unsaid."" --SARAH MINOR ""Throughout his work and life, Sam Ace has always been--deliberately, tirelessly, faithfully--moving towards whatever is more true and clear and life-giving than whatever is or was. This book begins, ""I want to start by saying,"" but it's less a beginning than an insistence that more more more--more seeing, more saying, more yearning, more loving and losing, naming the things we've lost--makes us more human and alive. This book is an incantation for us to sing on the road to God."" --REBECCA BROWN"

Author Information

Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author most recently of Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish), Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don't wash. (Belladonna* Germinal Texts), and Stealth with poet Maureen Seaton (Chax). Ace is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a repeat finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series.

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