How is a lyric poem like a polygraph machine? A personal, poetic examination of the technology of truth-telling.
Eric Schmaltz’s
I Confess
delves into the complexities of truth-telling in poetry, and the history of technologies designed to produce truth from willing and unwilling subjects, considering what it means to use a device – poetry or polygraph – to draw out one’s most profound feelings and emotions.
Exploring the intersection of power, technology, and language,
meditates on lie detection and its history, including trials by ordeal and pseudoscientific technologies. The poet then turns to his own personal experiences working with a lie detector and polygraph analyst. Taking himself as the central subject of the book, Schmaltz puts his subjectivity and positionality under scrutiny.
The answers to questions such as
What does family mean to you?
and
Can you describe a time when you felt your best?
inspire a range of forms from conventional lyrical verse to list poems to palindromes to visual poems. With an afterword by Orchid Tierney,
is a personal, poetic document of truth’s performance under duress.