Adam Stutz: Days After

In Days After, Adam Stutz’s concise lyrics distill the anxiety and dissociation of loss and grief into starkly dis/comforting exposures of the speaker’s condition, “Driving through the expanse / of nervous light / leaving the day in my side mirror / as I drive home” . . . Led through what is dubbed “The Horror Show” (perhaps—and we can view this empathetically—of the poet’s own self-identified neurodivergence), a reader is left ultimately alone—with the speaker “asking questions in the vagary of fog / along a valley that never seems to end—” and with the choice either to look away, or to confront “the refusal / echoing inside / the glass house” that may in fact be our own. The paradoxical vulnerability of “An inspired animosity” that haunts these pages demands that a reader look deeper. “Don’t let this define me” the speaker urges, “this insistent patter of the same sad song repeating / the refrain “we were always falling apart”

4.25" w x 6.875" h. 118 pages.

ISBN: 978-1-971551-06-7