bury it

By George Monbiot

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

Sam Sax's bury it, winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, begins with poems written in response to the spate of highly publicized young gay suicides in the summer of 2010. What follows are raw and expertly crafted meditations on death, rituals of passage, translation, desire, diaspora, and personhood. What's at stake is survival itself and the archiving of a lived and lyric history. Laughlin Award judge Tyehimba Jess says "bury it is lit with imagery and purpose that surprises and jolts at every turn. Exuberant, wild, tightly knotted mesmerisms of discovery inhabit each poem in this seethe of hunger and sacred toll of toil. A vitalizing and necessary book of poems that dig hard and lift luminously." In this phenomenal second collection of poems, sam sax invites the reader to join him in his interrogation of the bridges we cross, the bridges we burn, and bridges we must leap from.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9780819577320

George Monbiot

Sam Sax is a queer, jewish, writer and educator. They are the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and Bury It, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They’re the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Granta and elsewhere. Sam has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, and is currently serving as a Lecturer in the ITALIC program at Stanford University. Their first novel Yr Dead will be published by McSweeney’s in 2024.

Book preview

WILL

the fisherman’s sneakers trouble the water

he baits his hooks with homophones, cartilage, pheromones

his hooks : telephones, specula, seraphim

he lowers his line into the dark

an adrenal needle plunged into the heart

feels something bite below the river

& pulls up boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

after boy,

BILDUNGSROMAN

i never wanted to grow up to be anything horrible as a man. my biggest fear was the hair they said would snake from my chest, swamp trees breathing as i ran. i prayed for a different kind of puberty: skin transforming into floor boards muscles into cobwebs, growing pains sounding like an attic groaning under the weight of old photo albums. as a kid i knew that there was a car burning above water before this life, i woke here to find fire scorched my hair clean off until i shined like glass—my eyes, two acetylene headlamps. in my family we have a story for this: my brother holding me in his hairless arms. says

dad it will be a monster we should bury it.

ULTRASOUND

it’s not that we’re all born

genderless, though we are.

rather, once we were all small

women inside our mothers.

something about science

& sex organs & hormones

& god. no wonder she wept

red negligee when she walked in

on me at ten in her worst dress

spinning before her dead

father’s mirror, my eyes made up

into science fictions. felt me

again inside her, my pig thirst

threading her blood & body

mass into another veil i’d wear

& not care for. seeing mother

cry i found myself

into manlier fabrics. when i am

a boy again she tells me

it’s not that she hated me fey

rather, that day she swore

she saw the mirror sob. fetal lady,

little daughter, tiny apology.

NEW GOD OF AN ANTIQUE WAR

i only want the world

to end when i’m done

with it

a boy stares into the lake & falls

in love

it’s not how you think,

with his own reflection

but rather

the lake

o to be so fluid you can hold

another’s shape

& stay the same thing

this story is a horse

beaten into a new name

a french king builds a palace

of mirrors & bankrupts his countrymen

you can’t drink glass

without becoming

something else

sure, everyone has heartache

but mine lives

in my body