Seldom Approaches

Seldom Approaches is a collection of poems, transcribed readings, and prose writings spanning nearly a decade, presented asynchronously, and interlaced with narrative passages, both abstract and autobiographical. It is a book both formed and unformed in a process of becoming. In Seldom Approaches, Syd Staiti breaks boundaries of genre, identity, and narrative to trace the mental breakdown and physical transformation of an anonymous activist at the height of the Occupy Oakland protests. A set of characters engage in a mission to destroy a building—which a poem from the past. Time loops backward, events repeat, and the narrator undergoes transitions of the body and mind. The book exposes its own beams and scaffolding, chipped paint, and cracked open windows, in the same manner that the writer’s body in early years of transition bears its own scars, patchworked stubble, and changing voice.