Praise

No one makes an entrance quite like Andy Sia. Ludic, melodic,  invigoratingly paronomastic, Sia’s debut collection Sleuth opens onto  the most unsolvable intrigues—riddles of sensation, of language become-sensate. Sia draws on the detective genre, but his gumshoe  is no cynic. As innocent as he is shrewd, the sleuth throws his hat  into the ring most literally (“Smack into the body of the stagehand[!]  Smack into the stony lion face[!]”) and vows to play the truest of games: to live in the world, to live big. If “all the doors regurgitate like  birds” and the sun rises to “flush the vacuous aquariums of shuttered  eyelids,” it is by a blessed prescience and in joyous anticipation of this  brilliant new star in our transnational skies. —Aditi Machado, author of Material Witness

In these poems—with “[s]omething always rushing in like platelets  through the aortic courtyard!”—we meet Andy Sia, who might be the  love child of Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein. As these poems root  and rut in rich lexical compost, the known world breaks into inklings.  And in this “bath of baths, we get into the knots of flesh”—and  into the “ribboned oops of beauty.” The abstract strikes the physical,  lighting a match to read by. And weird as these poems are, alive to  our present burden of corruption, they are nonetheless poems of praise and love. —Joanie Mackowski, author of View from a Temporary Window 

To take the bestial origin of “sleuth” and to alchemize it, to see  language search itself in language: detective as hound, hound as  villager, villager as villager-not-quite exercised to annotate the roomy  excesses of poetry. Andy Sia cracks language as investigative tool. As  in, what can there be to know after knowing? Sia’s Sleuth leads us into  the mysteries of language as “pleasure to step into a role, leaving open the question of further pleasures.” A ploy, sure, but also a “form of intense kindness!” What “ribboned oops of beauty!” —Jimin Seo, author of Ossia

In Sleuth, Andy Sia recalibrates the detective as lyric consciousness.  Sleuth weaves prose, drama, games, sonic experiments, & conceptual  explorations into investigations of the nature of investigating. Clocks  barricade. Lions flounce. The coat fits. Meaning gathers in the breath  & the rhyme as much as in the sentence. Sia’s writing is sensual &  comic, both challenging & fun, mapping a path to making the weird  world more weirdly knowable. Shelve this in your paracosm’s library,  between Dashiell Hammett, the Book of Job, & a dreaming brain in a vat. —Mathias Svalina, author of Thank You Terror