Sam Sax

"Sam Sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet's personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners ... [this] collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it"--

Madness

"Forgive my bluntness, but... Goddamn, Sam Sax can write some poems. Devastating, comic, inventive, weird, dangerous, smart as hell. I could talk about the diction sometimes glass and sometimes bouquet. Or the syntax jagged here, balletic there. Or the metaphors, good lord. But the bottom line is that when reading the poems in A GUIDE TO UNDRESSING YOUR MONSTERS, one after the next, I kept saying to myself, probably twisting my face a little bit or squirming in my seat, 'Goddamn, Sam Sax can write some poems.'"--Ross Gay

A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters

Winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets

Bury It

From the brilliantly talented National Poetry Series and James Laughlin Award winner comes a third collection of poems that uses the humble pig as a lens to explore the body, faith, desire, and power. This imaginative and singular poetry collection interrogates the broadest ideas surrounding the humble pig—farm animal, men/masculinity, police and state violence, desire, queerness, global food systems, religion/Judaism and law—to reimagine various chaotic histories of the body, faith, ecology, desire, hygiene, and power. Sam Sax draws on autobiography and history to create poems that explore topics ranging from drag queens and Miss Piggy to pig farming and hog lagoons. Collectively, these poems, borne of Sax’s obsession, offer a varied picture of what it means to be a human being. Delivered in a variety of forms, infused with humor, grace, sadness, and anger, Pig is a wholly unique collection from a virtuosic and original poet.

Poems

Yr Dead

In All the Rage, sam sax turns the poetry of observation into weapon of prayer and resurrection. Here is the eroticism and anger of bearing witness. Here the dead walk again, sometimes right over us, sometimes right through us. Here are open wounds wet with the spit of old lovers and old versions of ourselves, raw, hungry, and unwilling to let us forget what we've seen.

All the Rage

Poetry. LGBT Studies. From his first appearance on the page, "we knew he was bound for something unsolvable." But a little thing like futility can't stop our hero from holding up a magnifying glass to a world "so bright it's impossible to understand." In this searching, provocative collection of coming-of-age sonnets, the sad boy detective listens close, collects the evidence, and reimagines the strange landscapes of a life, a body, a boy, a self. Through a questioning, fervent lens, sam sax's SAD BOY / DETECTIVE reminds us how deeply bizarre and at times undecipherable all this existence stuff truly is. "Sam Sax's SAD BOY / DETECTIVE uses the unholy sonnet in ways that would make Jarman marvel and sigh. The entirety of this volume destabilizes our ideas of what it means to write the coming of age novel, what it means to be undetectable. And Sax is forever fighting the fight of a poet who is made aware of his separation from the world by the fact that he is-in sorrow, sex, danger, or celebration—moored to all he sees because his seeing is a searchlight."—Jericho Brown "The SAD BOY / DETECTIVE of this book is on the case of his biggest mystery yet: the strangeness of existence itself. Reading these cleverly serialized sonnets is like pressing your ear to a door full of wonders you're unsure you're prepared to inherit. The book enacts a powerful awakening. Sam Sax is a terrific emerging poet. Like a sleuth with a magnifying glass, you're going to want to follow him everywhere."—Dobby Gibson

Sad Boy / Detective

Cam Awkward-Rich

The Dead Animal Handbook is a field guide to contemporary American poetry. Collecting and compiling emerging and established writers from a range of backgrounds, this Handbook charts one of poetry's most used tropes in order to bring the dead animal back to life. We're eager and we're earnest. Poets include: Martín Espada, Airea D. Matthews, Jericho Brown, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Traci Brimhall, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Franny Choi, CAConrad, Dean Young, Aziza Barnes, Rachel McKibbens, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, D.A. Powell, and many more talents. Warning: if you dare carry on, beware carrion.

Sam Sax

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