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In the poem “Fraternity,” by Sam Sax, the speaker depicts a standstill moment in time hearing about a tragic event in which two brothers fell of a tall building and one passed away. The speaker reflects how he is “in the middle of his life in the middle of Texas listening to a man tell the story of [the] two brothers,” The description of how the speaker hears this awful news in a random moment of his life relates to how horrific events happen every day at the most unpredictable times. This reminded me of when I sometimes will hear of a tragedy on the news or through social media and I have to stop and think for a moment what just happened and how it reflects to my own life. Even when it might have nothing to do with me or my experiences, it still takes some processing to comprehend how something so terrible could occur to innocent people. The poem then goes on to illustrate the speaker is “lying on [his] back listening for the sound of skin against pavement.” The fact that the speaker takes a moment to hear the vibrations of his own body, reveals how he feels the need to hear something alive, after learning about this deadly event. This description reminds me of times when I have had nightmares about horrific events, and wake up to feel my heart beating and my breathing and conscious self. Later in the poem, the speaker describes how he calls his “brother just to hear him breathing and he's an empty sound, a scythe knifing still air.” The speaker’s comparison of the sounds of his brother’s breathing to a tool cutting nothing in blank space highlights the awful feeling after hearing about a tragic event. Talking to family, friends, and peers sometimes take a second to understand when in an upset state of mind. At the end of the poem, the speaker describes another moment seeing “two boys in matching greek jackets stumble drunk in the dark...fighting god to stay erect.” I thought it was chilling for the author to end the poem this way because it reveals how although sometimes you may be nowhere near a tragedy, other times you can be at the scene of the situation and how you act in that instant could have a significant impact on one’s future. In this case, the speaker leaves us with the image of him watching or witnessing students who made dumb decisions that may place their lives at risk. It leaves the readers with the idea that in a moment like this, it's time to act and make a difference.

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In the poem “Post Diagnosis” by Sam Sax, one's thought process after a hopeful recovery from an illness and awaiting a post diagnosis is depicted. This poem is written in few words and is structured in a unique way with 2-3 words, then a space, and then a few more words following in each line. In my opinion, this setup creates a more soft toned poem and adds a more specific meaning to each and every line. The speaker first states that “the brain is an unlit synagogue.” Comparing one's mind to a dark place of prayer highlights the emptiness and silence in a person's thoughts after hearing news of what their post diagnosis for a disease or illness is. It reveals how when people are hearing or waiting for important news, they may think of the worst and isolate themselves to prepare. The poem also describes how “using machines can baffle faith.” This reveals how when taking medical tests and using monitors to predict an outcome, this machinery can confuse the patient and sometimes anticipate incorrect results. This highlights the struggle of waiting to hear a post diagnosis because one may think they are well and improved, when they may still be struggling and sick. Later in the poem, it is depicted how when hearing or waiting for news, “it's simple to rage and riot and rot.” Having to hear that one has not recovered, can make a person angry and frustrated at the hard work they have put in to receive no positive result. It's a difficult process when struggling to get better from an illness, and the post diagnosis can make or break a persons mindset to improve. The poem ends by stating that “medicines can not.” This short statement depicts how sometimes drugs and treatment can sometimes have no effect on persons improvement and hinder them from progressing in a recovery. When medication does not help a person, this can be devastating to hear because on most occasions it is the most effective process to getting better from many mental and physical illnesses.

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Sam Sax is a popular Jewish writer and educator. He is the author of multiple books and poems and is very well known in the poetry community. He enjoys creating poems that are brave or adventurous and can make a “spine tremble on the first or 30th read.” Sam Sax fulfills a position in working as a poem editor at the BOAAT press. He has received many awards during his poetry career such as being the Bay Area Unified Grand Slam Champion two times as well as winning The Los Angeles Review and Red Hen Press's 2015 Wild Light Poetry Prize. In addition, Sam Sax won the 2017 James Laughlin Award for his poem “Bury It.” This award is given to someone to acknowledge a second poetry book each year at the start of the new calendar. The award includes a cash prize as well as a pre paid trip to Miami, Florida where the author can present his or her  book to a significant number of people from the Academy of American Poets. In addition, Sam Sax is also the author of the books Madness, All the Rage, The Silence Between, Past Unforgiving, and Teardrops in Sand: The Man- The Mood- The Moments. Sax obtained fellowships from multiple associations such as National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, Stanford University, and an abundance of others. The poems he has written are published throughout many news articles and popular websites. They are featured on buzzfeed, in the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, and many other places on the internet.

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sam sax, OC '09, is the author of four chapbooks and the 2017 poetry book Madness, winner of the National Poetry Series. He is also the poetry editor at BOAAT Press. sax has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Lambda Literary. His poems have appeared in The New York TimesPoetry MagazineBuzzfeedPANKTin House, and more. His latest collection, Bury It, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2018.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Can you tell me a bit about how and when you first came to writing poetry?
I did a lot of theater. I was a playwright, because my brother was an actor, and I sort of got into that world that way. I also tried out other performance styles. I was in a poetry group in high school, but mostly that was just a way to mess around with friends. It was at Oberlin, where there were these weekly open mics that my friend ran at Agave, I think, so I'd go to those weekly events and sort of have to channel all these multidisciplinary things that I was doing into this one poem form, which ended up being a lot more compelling. I hadn't planned on it being my life until I graduated, and then I ended up getting in a car with some friends who were on a poetry tour and ended up traveling around the country for a year doing readings. It was at that moment - when I saw how communities are built around literature, and how transformative a poem can be to someone's internal and external material life - that I decided I wanted to dedicate my life to it, and it became my focus and passion. But it was a slowly evolving act for me.
You just recently published a full-length book, Madness. What has that experience been like for you, having published it, and has that changed anything about your relationship to your writing?
A book is something I've wanted for a very long time. For a while [I had] very unrealistic expectations about what a book would do for my life, and then no one would pick up my book for many years. Then I ended up writing a second book, which was Madness, which then got picked up immediately through the National Poetry Series. At that point I had pretty low expectations about publishing, and a pretty dismal understanding about how the publishing industry works for poetry. But since then, it's been great. The person who picked my book is named Terrance Hayes, and we've become friendly through that. I guess I'd been touring well before having a book, but it opens certain doors academically, where I'm doing readings at certain institutions, and opened up certain speaking options that weren't there beforehand. But I don't know if it's changed my writing. I think it's important for me to write away from the idea of the work being in the world or being published. It's nice to have a book out there, but it's still important for me to write many things that won't be seen.

I think what sort of helped with that process is that being a second book. There's a lot of pressure on a first book of poems in a way that I think tends to dead someone's writing process, so I think having it be a longer process or practice of writing, there's less stifling of it. And my next book is coming out in the fall, so I think being able to immediately hop into another project has also made me feel a little anxious about what this book is doing and the effect it has on my writing life and on the world.
How much does identity inform your poetry in Madness? Can you speak to how that informs your process, especially in these larger collections?
Entirely. I feel like I'm always writing from my particular position in relation to the world, so being hyper-aware of that makes for the most compelling and honest work I can make. Everybody has, obviously, multiple identities, and I think it's important for me to follow the path that they all lean towards. It's important for me to write about Judaism and queerness and whiteness and masculinity, and that affects my particular vantage on how I look at history and how I move through the world. All of the historical work that goes into this work is rooted in that as well - being the grandson of a Freudian analyst and negotiating mental illness - it's all sort of tied in.
You mentioned earlier that you've done slam and spoken word. How does the relationship between doing that, and also writing poetry for the page, work for you? Do you find them to be very similar or different?
It sort of happened organically. I came to writing through performance, and through seeing how transformative a poem can be when spoken. And then I started making chapbooks to sell on tour, so the publishing part of it became a necessary outgrowth of the spoken gesture of the poem. And then I turned to the page a little more and saw how poems in space offer voice on page in the same way that moves me about spoken poetry. So I'm thinking about Terrance Hayes' "Wind in a Box" or "Teahouse of the Almighty" by Patricia Smith or Essex Hemphill's "Ceremonies" - they're all books that I read early or that showed me what's possible on the page. I think some poems work better in the air, some poems work better on the page, but for me it's more interesting to make work that is able to sing across multiple media - in the ear, in the eye, in the brain, in the mouth. Yeah. I think it also prioritizes the necessary urgency of the spoken gesture.
In line with that concept of urgency, what role do you think poetry is playing or has to play in today's political climate, and do you think it can remain apolitical? Are there obligations artists have to respond to what's happening in the world?
I think the political import and impact of poetry is first and foremost representation and empathy. Poetry very much can be alive, and I think that in order to mobilize people or mobilize bodies they have to be alive for it to sink in. I think that's the primary effect - seeing that your experience in the world is not singular, seeing that your struggles and the immaterial qualities of your life are experienced by other people is one of the most powerful things a poem can do. It can help people feel the lives in and around those conditions. I also think it's a useful tool for accessing the potential of our world, where you can imagine a better world in the writing. I think there's some freedom in a poem to speak back ... or through to power in ways that are suppressed in other forms. Which is why I think, historically, poets are often the first people assassinated or incarcerated by repressive and fascist governments. I don't think the work that poetry is doing now is different from what it has been doing historically in various policed and repressed communities in the United States and elsewhere. It continues to serve that similar function.
How does the presence of an audience inform the way that you work and the way that you interrogate your personal experience in poetry?
Well, I think there's something about performing - an audience can be a really excellent editor. Seeing how the poem lives and works in the air really helps you hear what the poem is doing on the page, and also seeing how it's going to affect folks, right? Often you write in isolation, and you don't know what kind of work your poem's going to do until it does the work. I've read a poem before where I've seen people wince at moments that I'm not trying to have them wince at, and that's really telling, you know? Or, they wince at moments where I want them to wince. And that's affirming for the poem that I'm making. I think having a regular audience is really useful. I don't have a regular spot I go to anymore, but I think hearing your work aloud can be really helpful.
Do you have obsessions that you write about and can you talk a bit about how they manifest in your work if you do?
Often my body will have a response to the world that I don't understand, either disgust or pleasure or desire, and I'm like, "Oh, why am I feeling this way?" I think those tend to be the moments that I try and write myself into, whether it's my feelings around Zionism, or anal pleasure, or these larger embodied and historical topics that root around at me. I use the poem as a way to navigate how I feel and situate myself in and around it. I think generally my writing is invested in desire, and where that comes from, like how identity is constructed and inherited. Mental health and addiction come up a lot; grief tends to be the major circling point. I think also the questions seem to be evolving, thank goodness, so it's not a singular area of interrogation.

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sam sax, OC '09, is the author of four chapbooks and the 2017 poetry book Madness, winner of the National Poetry Series. He is also the poetry editor at BOAAT Press. sax has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Lambda Literary.

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Article including interview with Sam Sax

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Article including interview with Sam Sax

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BURY IT, THE NEWEST COLLECTION from poet sam sax, opens with a poem that looks like a fishing line cast into the sea. In it, a fisherman "feels something bite below river and pulls up boy / after boy / after boy / after boy / after boy..." The words repeat 50 times, taking up a page and a half - signifying a long line of gay youth who have committed suicide. This act of reaching out in active, sorrowful, earnest motion guides sax's collection.
The poems grapple with the deaths of boys on the news, the deaths of boys who aren't on the news, the death of a relationship, a lover, a poet - as well as with missing persons, and a neighbor who felt a bullet tearing through his brain "like a nail / through a fig." Meanwhile, the living are still living, trying to make sense of death and how to live within the confines of grief. Through attention to news and social media, reimagined burial rituals and elegies, as well as carefully crafted first-person origin-story poems, sax examines the beauty of a young, male queer life while never letting up on the threats to its existence. The poet joined me in conversation via Skype from Oakland, where he is in residency for the Stegner Poetry Fellowship. It was November, just a few weeks after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, and we spoke about the role poetry can have in response to tragedy. We also discussed how Judaism and research inform his responses to inherited trauma and his desire to trace lineage through language.
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EMILY SERNAKER: How are you liking the Stegner Fellowship and being in the bay? You've mentioned that you like to write in public - have you found your spots?

SAM SAX: It's been lovely. A lot of folks I love are still here, and I'm doing work that interests me so that's been beautiful. There's time to write and lead workshop. Once a week I get to speak with a lot of really smart people who are poets and educators, so the conversation in workshop has been respectful and intelligent in ways that haven't always been the case in poetry workshops I've had before.

I'm writing on the train a lot because it takes two hours to get down to Stanford - something about writing in transit and around people has been generative.
And you're working on a novel ... and a book about pigs?
The novel I haven't really touched in a little bit. It's just fermenting in its drawer. But the pig book has a been a slow and steady slog. I just finished a poem in Pig Latin for the project, and then an ode to Miss Piggy, and a poem about - well this is a bit upsetting - it's about how the US military field medics train on pigs in agricultural fields. So, the more I look into both the physical animal and the way the animal exists in culture and literature and history, it seems to be a project that keeps opening itself up to new resonances.
Was there a catalyst for that project? Like a moment when you thought - it's definitely time for a pig book.
Well, yes. Around the corner from me in Brooklyn there was this pig who lived at the hardware store named Franklin. I think he lived in the apartment upstairs, and they would bring him down. So I would go hang out with him. And he was very sweet. And that in part led me to stop eating pork. And then no pork led to me being kosher for the last three or four months, and that sort of historic dietary religious and spiritual practice has reinvigorated my appreciation for the pig as symbol and the pig as metaphor.

But I also just looked at the poems I had and they were all about shitty men, or being slutty, or fascism, right? And those are called pigs. I also went back to read some of the iconic middle school readers that go into pigs. And I've been doing erasures on Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies and playing with these early formative texts.
As a queer, Jewish writer, what topics are you most interested in examining? Is your exploration connected to a history of exile?
My work is deeply invested in Jewish storytelling, culture, language, and my family's history. My work attempts to recontextualize us as a historically diasporic people, who've become beautiful through our movement and adaptation. Exile is a tricky word for me. Exile for some reason rings of the desire to return, of entitlement to land, to birthright, which led to the creation of that violent settler colonial nation-state. My work instead revels in estrangement, in the strange; it wants to live in what's queer about being Jewish.
And that's where unpacking things like the word "Feygele" and the Yiddish epigraph come in with bury it?
The epigraph is to me sort of a prayer. It speaks to an idealized community and readership I would like to be a part of. I think it's also holding myself accountable to how I want to write and who I'm writing for and the heart and politic behind the writing. Feygele came from an investment in etymology, and a move I use in general when I feel stuck: I look toward the historical movement of the word in the poem and see if that can open any doors. And so when I found out it comes from the German word for little bird, I got so gob-smacked full of wonder it had to become a poem - what could be a more perfect and strange description of queer people than little resilient winged things? What could be more powerful than flight? Since this is a book largely about bridges, I had to write about the one that lattices through my blood, that moved my people from Eastern Europe and Russian shtetls and brought me here to the page. I attempt to refigure and reclaim feygele, an often derisive slur, as a site of power and play.

So I sort of unearthed and untethered my relationship to it. So yeah, Judaism, queerness, whiteness, masculinity ... these are sites for exploring and unpacking our relationship to history and power.
You do that in "Kaddish" - breaking down the history of the word "dose" in overdose (from the Greek root "to give"). Why do you let the reader in on that process?
I like to be transparent with the reader. Offering that kind of transparency of showing how the mind moves on paper is really interesting to me. Sometimes the writer [comes across] as this researched and indelible site of knowledge and not someone who is working through something and trying to learn - and failing on paper.
And in the poem "Bury," you share about research.
With the poem "Bury" in particular, I did a lot of research on various burial practices thinking that would be a structure for the book or a long middle section. And all of that research ended up being two lines. I didn't know how to use it in a way outside of just saying I've done this research and I don't know what to do with it. It's also connected to a scholarly, archival impulse for research and documentation. Research to me is finding guide posts through the wilderness and the bewilderment of writing.
was a book born out of tragedy. I am wondering, while also reflecting on the shooting at the synagogue, what you think poetry's role is in response to tragedy.
I think it's a way to articulate a feeling of grief and having a way to share it with other people. It's having that shared interior experience and being less alone with grief. And I also think it's a way of harkening back to a history and putting your grief in context - which is something Jews in particular are remarkable at. So much of our literary history is documenting inherited trauma and negotiating how to move though that. That is how poetry operates to me. A poem can be really useful in radically reorienting us toward a present filled with history. It can let us hold all the tragedies of the current moment while also being able to live and thrive in the current moment.
When did you realize in addition to being a book about suicides, bury it was also a coming-of-age story?
This was technically my first book. I started working on it before madness. So there were poems in the collection that felt, trope-wise, "first-booky." Poems of introduction, of articulating an artistic sense and sensibility. And I think that often manifests as "where I am now and how I got here." I think there's that element that made it a queer coming-of-age narrative. And the sort of elegiac impulse - especially toward young queer people who have died - is looking back at childhood and early identity formation. And looking at how we got here through our various histories and structural violences - bullying, erasure, exclusion - and at quite literally how we came of age.
It shows how a poem about a boy being shamed for trying on his mother's clothes can connect with boys jumping off bridges.
Yes, that's right.
You talk about the performative nature of grief with that Robert Hayden line, "I grieve. Yet I know the vanity of grief." Why was that important to touch on?
That comes up in a few poems, including "Politics of Elegy," which looks at the history of the elegy as a form and how writing about loss and the newly dead is for the living and how complicated that power can be. I think it also connects to the epigraph of the book - how rendering in language any loss is always a performance. And so I think that's another instance of me trying to be transparent about my process, and about writing. To write an elegy is to memorialize, and it is a ceremony of ritual, but it is also a performative text.
Technology has a big presence in the poems. Did you realize that would be such a strong thread? So many connections between men in the book couldn't have happened without technology, yet isolation and disconnection come with it too.
Absolutely. I think so much of my queer identity came through mediated social technology through finding other queers online, or making another idealized self on hook-up apps. Most contemporary queer writers I know engaged with sexuality through technology and it's affecting how the poems look on the page. I think we're at a really pivotal moment for the way these little machines we keep in our pocket are affecting lyric architecture. In the same way that a typewriter influenced O'Hara's lines and the speed at which thinking in O'Hara's poems happens, I think we're beginning to see what's possible both textually and image-wise in terms of the screen shot - there's no limit to what we're about to see happen in the lyric landscape.
Was Ginsberg a big influence?
Ginsberg was for sure a catalyst for me. He was the first time I ever saw a queer Jewish writer. He wrote at what's difficult about desire and the body and figuring out how to celebrate it. His poem "Sphincter" was really formative for me and led to a lot of work on anal pleasure and queerness. Also to thinking about ways that what's rendered disgusting culturally or discursively violent about the body is also a place to be celebrated. And thinking about how pleasure or the desire for pleasure has been so often what's made people want to die - as queer people. [Ginsberg's] celebration and analysis of queerness was really formative, and helped me form a new language and politic.
What writers are you reading these days?
I just had a dream about While Standing in Line for Death by CAConrad so I had to read it, and the semiotic exercises leaping between the prose and the poems themselves have been really disorienting and lovely and inspiring. So there's that book. I've been turning back to Lucie Brock-Broido, her books. I'm also reading Jews and Words by Amos Oz and his historian-daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger. That book has been messing with me and showing me what's possible.

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Emily Sernaker is a writer and human rights professional. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Ms. magazine, McSweeney's, The Sun, Rattle, New Ohio Review, GOOD Media, The Rumpus, and more.

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Grief, Ritual, and Estrangement: An Interview with sam sax - Los Angeles Review of Books

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BURY IT, THE NEWEST COLLECTION from poet sam sax, opens with a poem that looks like a fishing line cast into the sea. In it, a fisherman "feels something bite below river and pulls up boy / after boy / after boy / after boy / after boy..."

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Bury by sam sax - Poems | Academy of American Poets

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i look to history to explain & this is my first mistake
when i say history i mean the stone
half-buried by the roadside has witnessed
more tragedy than a filthy glass of a water. i look to the water
but all i see is dust. i look to the dust & all there is
is history. here's a feather & well of blood
to write the labor movement across the fractal
back of infrastructure. here's a father leaving home
to build railroads with his bare hands. write the laws
that claw the eyes from owls, that build a wall
between the river & the thirsty, that drag families
from one hell into the next. o this house of mine
was built by men & o i, a man sometimes, pass
through its acid chambers & leave out the backdoor
dust. when i say history i mean what lives in us,
i mean the faux gold chain around my neck,
the diseases passed from generation to generation
dating back to a time before christ, i mean any word
traced to its origin is a small child begging for water.

-previously published in Guernica

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Missing Persons
it's silly
missing anyone
who lives

or maybe
the opposite

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you can only
miss the living
in a way
that ferries
marrow up
your spine
in one furious
red curtain

or no
the dead
they're the ones
that open
the asphalt
for ghost-buses
to pour forth from
covered in
ink-black names
scrwld across
the windows

paint-thick names
names so dark
inside you can blink
or be blinded
or die
& be unable to tell
the difference

i miss everyone
all the time.

my room's a coffin
with one glass wall

outside
there's a parade
to welcome me

the horns
are so bright
& blood-drunk
you might think
something
was being born

the bullet tore
through my neighbor's brain
like a nail
through a fig

i began
to love him
only once

the ambulances
sang into
the radio-singed stillness

-previously published in Prairie Schooner

__________________________________

From Bury It. Courtesy of Wesleyan University Press. Copyright © 2018 by sam sax.

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i look to history to explain & this is my first mistake when i say history i mean the stone half-buried by the roadside has witnessed more tragedy than a filthy glass of a water. i look to the water but all i see is dust.