Samuel Ace in Person

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.

Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer writer and sound artist. His latest books are I want to start by saying (Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2024), Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish 2019), and Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* 2019). 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. Recent work can be found in Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most, Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, Fence, BathHouse, The Texas Review, Poetry, We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetry, Best American Experimental Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies.

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