Poetry. "Sam Truitt gives 'mouth to mouth resuscitation' to the ancient quest poem as he writes 'to voyage is to become/Hysterical.' In the maximal narrative loop of this book, Marilyn Monroe's skirt is perpetually going 'whoosh' in an Einsteinian vacuum where 'the displacement of the figure is the form" -Peter Gizzi.

Anamorphosis Eisenhower

Literature & Fiction

Truitt, Sam

Poetry

Lost Roads Publishers

Poetry. "Sam Truitt's unusually sculptural poem is a lockbox of secrets. But each layer of concealment, spun out of language, reveals more insidious truths. The use of Morse code and Shakespearian fragments provides a cool and elusive, but also disturbing, conceptual frame. As in Hannah Weiner's Semaphore and Tom McCarthy's C, the act of coding both enacts and compresses distance. Feminine speech and military speech, ciphers for American life in the mid-20th century, rattle around the edge of a grave or a bomb site. DICK pulsates with violence and mystery."—Chris Kraus

Dick: A Vertical Elegy

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Lunar Chandelier Press

Street Mete's multimedia montage is a performative work in language/photo art. Truitt creates a poetics of transcribed voice recordings and on-the-spot photos made in the streets and subways of New York between 1996 and 2004.Infused journal entries give autobiographical edge to its sometimes harsh historical landscape that includes the fall of civilizations, yoking for example the Mayan ruins of Chich

Vertical Elegies 6: Street Mete

United States

AmazonUs/INDPB

Poetry. TOKYOATOTO is made of and from a hand-written book composed by the poet Sam Truitt during a 2019 Tokyo sojourn. The writing includes, among other elements, descriptions, impressions, insights into Japanese life and culture and the concrete exigencies of negotiating a foreign land. This last is complicated as Truitt lived in Tokyo for four years from the age of three: Japanese was very close to his first language, as Japan was close to being his first culture. This acts as a backfield to the writing as Truitt both seeks and betimes touches traces of their influence. TOKYOATOTO'S structure is unique in that Truitt seeks to foreground that movement toward originality by reproducing in facsimile the pages of the hand-written book. An engaging, thoughtful and sometimes profound glimpse into contemporary life in Tokyo from a perspective of complicated naivete, TOKYOATOTO is a fast, entertaining poetic tramp full of pratfalls, missed connections, and surrenders in which, as the author writes on a Tokyo subway passage, "one senses a web each of us hold together & against & around us like a net knit of civility not docility as there are some faraway landscapes in our mind & in our heart & our bodies are dreaming all of them uniting to listen to the underground hum its magic."

Tokyoatoto

Station Hill Press

Poetry. Sam Truitt's landmark work of contemporary poetry, VERTICAL ELEGIES: THREE WORKS consists of the long poem 'Song of Rasputin,' the 40-day poetic chronicle 'Raton Rex,' and the multi-layered concrete poem 'Falltime.' "Sam Truitt's poems have a don't-stop-me-now-I'm-almost-there urgency to them. He has always been disposed to the book-length rather than the page-length poem. He has no patience for the voice's removal from the scene--the language he seems destined to sing holds too much hubris, speed, and childlike wonder to hold back. Instead, cunning formal maneuverings provide the distance and displacement needed to rattle the teeth of syntax and alter the current beat. As a reader, one gets caught up in the frenzy. There is the pleasure of verbal abandon and the reassurance of visual control. There is the perpetually keyed-up anticipation of anything-could-happen-here..."--C.D. Wright.

Vertical Elegies: Three Works

Ugly Duckling Presse