The Scales by Adam Stutz $14

Paperback book, 80 pages

The Scales is a meditative & explorative experience on balancing work life with personal life & passions, the spiritual & the realm of realism, the demands of expression & sorrows of exploitation, as well as the inherent & social judgements put upon humans. It looks at abstract ideas & feelings with scrutiny in order to understand the disposition of the human state, at the center of a vast & teetering scale.

“Your children are operating

systems—

failed escape hatch

prediction

expectation—

they come apart

loving blindly

(from The Scales)”

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What others are saying about Stutz’s The Scales:

"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)

"In 'The Scales', Adam Stutz carves his name into the desk, the cubicle daily matter of human space. Seeding the microtonal, pixelated 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)

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ADAM STUTZ

Adam Stutz is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Broken Lens Journal and the author of Transcript (Cooper Dillon Books, 2017) and The Scales (White Stag Publishing, 2018). His work has appeared in various print and online publications including The Equalizer: Second Series, The Cultural Society, A Sharp Piece of Awesome, Prelude, Be About It, Deluge, Dum Dum Zine, The Pinch, Where is the River, Dream Pop, Cover, Ghost Proposal, Columba Poetry, Only Good Poems, INKSOUNDS, The Racket, Spectra Poets, and can also be found at https://stutzwrites.com