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This poem is definitely one of the more obscure poems I have seen. Throughout the poem Sax presents research he has done. I personally have never seen research presented in the form of a poem which is what really drew me to this poem. The first line is really the most interesting. Sax starts off the poem by saying "i'm interested in death rituals." This is the perfect opening for the rest of the poem because it is so obscure. This line also sets the tone for the rest of the poem. The poem is mainly about death and the tradition of burial sparked written language. So, by opening such an obscure poem in such a bold way, Sax perfectly sets up the poem. Moreover, one of the most interesting and intriguing lines in the poem is when Sax states that gravestones "make an man/ alive again on paper." Death is something very hard for people to accept not only in this day and age but for all of time before hand. This statement by Sax perfectly sums up why people honor the dead and show there life on a grave stone for everyone to see. In addition, Sax also discusses representing dead people through art when he says "i know/ everyone/ i love who's dead didn't actually/ become the poem i wrote about/ them." When people honor the dead they only really focus on the bright and good parts of their life. Sax acknowledges that the people he remembers were not actually as perfect as his poems made them out to be. Sax's reflection on the language of the dead is truly one of kind and that is really what drew me to it. Additionally, immediately following his deep insight into honoring the dead, Sax states that "contrary to popular/ belief elephants don't actually bury/ their dead." This abrupt change of subject is another reason this poem is so unique. Sax makes a deep almost existential thought and then immediately jumps to a fun fact. Sax never fails to be himself and his poems are very much evident of that.

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Here is me reciting Sax's poem First Will and Testament.

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Sax's poem Fraternity is truly striking to me. The poem discusses the incident in which two Fraternity brothers fell off of a roof while drunk but only one survived. The poem is mainly Sax reflecting on this occurrence and thinking of his own future and family. This poem has a pretty existential theme to it where Sax reflects on his future and how short it really seems. He states that "my own brother might outlive me." This occurrence forced Sax to reflect on his personal life and think about how his future will play out. I felt like I could really connect to this since my future has just begun. Even more so, this poem talks about college and leaving your family behind which is exactly what I am about to do. Additionally, this poem talks about how short life can really be and how were all just "[stumbling] drunk/ through the dark, arms/ desperate for the other." We have become so co-dependent on each other not only for human connection but also for support. Never would we think that we could fall to our deaths surrounded by our closest friends. Sam Sax grapples with that very idea when he says "i call/ my brother just to hear him." Sax's brother is that support system so he calls him to access that after hearing such tragic news. He also calls him just to know that he is still alive and still willing and able to help. Additionally, Sax states that everyone is "fighting God to stay erect." Here, Sax says that our hands are in the fate of God. We are mortal and all we can really do is hope God is on our side. The world is a dangerous place and Sax reflects on that danger and how short life can really be. The brothers who died that night never thought that they would die that why and that night which is ultimately what motivated Sax to write this poem. For me, my future is uncertain and can change in the blink of an eye, just like those brothers on that rooftop.

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https://creativewriting.stanford.edu/people/sam-sax-0

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sam-sax

https://oberlinreview.org/15832/arts/sam-sax-writer-performer/

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Here is an article reviewing Sax's most recent collection Bury It.

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Sam Sax's Bury It completes the contemporary trinity of confessional poetry, accompanying Kaveh Akbar's Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Danez Smith's Don't Call Us Dead in continuing the discussion about identity and suffering. The speaker in Sax's collection opens his wounds afresh and offers them to the reader for examination, laying bare the disappointments and pain within the Jewish diaspora and contemporary society at large. The epigraph from James Fenton on the role of epitaphs sets a strong tone for the collection - Sax's poems are blunt and painful enough to serve as a eulogy but soothing and pleading enough to function as a diary that the reader was invited to glimpse.

Bury It is a highly personal and intimate collection, beginning with a poem about young gay suicides in 2010 to illustrate how society has failed youth and the LGBT+ community. What follows this arresting opening is poem after poem that punch the reader in the gut with emotional force and craft. "Pentimento" was one of my numerous favorites for this very reason, a poem that begins mid-run and doesn't stop even after the last line has been read. In it, Sax weaves a discourse that is a "painting of paintings," the layers of which continue mounting until the sense of overwhelming urgency and conflict is transferred to the reader from the speaker, who states:

if only I knew the history
of art I could give you
more than the color
of the thing [...]
i could use
expensive words to make
these bizarre gestures
tenable[.]

It is impossible not to stop and marvel at individual lines or passages in Bury It. Sax reexamines the limits of language, pushing to new heights with his imagery and unsettlingly honest wording. I treasured Sax's voice for its courageous and sharp tone, which is a comfort for those who need it and a wake-up call for those who have not taken the time to listen previously. One does not need to relate to everything in Bury It for the poems to make a reader tremble, as I did when the speaker in "Kaddish" tells of how

the first boy [he] took in [his] mouth
had the lord in him / just [his] luck /
always a half step from salvation[.]

Sax rejects the romanticization of suffering and suicide, topics that receive the respect and attention they deserve in his poems. While the first-person speaker gives the collection a personal tone, there is also a sense of universality to Sax's poems, a collective sort of bravery that comes from standing up not just for yourself but for those who cannot do so themselves. Filled with the vulnerability and strength of a survivor, Bury It creates a warm tightness in the throat. The poems feel like a microcosm, an experiment, for what society should strive toward, at a time when

pilgrims from all over
throw themselves into the bay's black eyes
add their names to that dark ledger.

Suicide and death form the backbone of the collection by inviting the reader to engage in a dialogue, to move away from the dismissive tendencies depicted in the poems. Sax demonstrates what sort of language and topics people need to open themselves up to, whether by being speakers or listeners, stressing that both roles are equally important in dispelling prejudices and creating a healing atmosphere.

The pace of the collection slows down toward the middle, yet the poems become no less impressive or powerful than the earlier ones. At this point, Sax focuses on unraveling the speaker's personal narratives while giving the reader ample opportunities to gorge on the luscious writing. It is in this second half that one will find poems like "Impossible Drama" and "Objectophile," which explore the other big themes in the collection: sexuality and gender roles.

Water plays an important role in this regard and was one of my favorite features of the collection. It was both meditative and jolting to note the ways in which Sax carried the image of water through the poems, either by mentioning it directly or by making the writing mimic its quality. Bury It was the first collection that, in my opinion, did justice not only to all the qualities of water but also to all the possibilities it offers, as noted by the speaker of "Hydrophobia" when he tells the reader:

let me tell you about water
it feeds you as it feeds
without it you die
without you it's fine[.]

There is so much more that can be said about Bury It, a collection that gives its reader endless reasons for admiration. From individual lines that one can collect and admire like small gems, to whole poems that are worth framing and imprinting in the memory, Sax is wickedly clever with his use of language and imagery. I felt like I were sitting on a stool facing the speaker, listening to his narrative and watching each poem unfold like a scene with its own self-contained tension and conflict that almost never had a resolution, the collection cycling through them one after the other as if a jukebox. Bury It is a collection that I firmly believe is impossible not to feel empathy for during and after reading,

to wonder what happens if instead I read his story backwards [...] if it ends how all stories end - an infant climbing into its mother, animals throwing themselves back in the ocean.

(from "Impermanence").

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Water as Identity: On Sam Sax's 'Bury It'

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Sam Sax's Bury It completes the contemporary trinity of confessional poetry, accompanying Kaveh Akbar's Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Danez Smith's Don't Call Us Dead in continuing the discussion about identity and suffering. The speaker in Sax's collection opens his wounds afresh and offers them to the reader for examination, laying bare the disappointments and pain within the Jewish diaspora and contemporary society at large.

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Sam Sax is a Jewish and Queer poet who has recently risen in the poetry world. He graduated from Oberlin College in 2009 and then went on to the University of Texas in Austin where he earned an MFA in poetry. In terms of education he has also earned fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, and the MacDowell Colony. In 2017 he published his first book of poetry titled Madness. This book then went on to be a winner of The National Poetry Series. Madness digs deep into the area of mental health and more specifically how being queer and addiction can really affect your life. In 2018 Sax published another collection of poems which he titled Bury It. This poetry collection won the James Laughlin award from The Academy of American Poets. Bury It starts by discussing the gay suicides in 2010 and then goes on the look into how being gay can affect your mental health. Currently, Sax is working on a collections of poems about pigs. This work will be very different from Sax's other work due to the lighter subject and different themes throughout his work. Sax has really risen as a tope rated poet of his generation and still has a lot of time left in his career to rise even higher and become a true symbol of modern American poetry.

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& here i am: somewhere
in the middle of my life
in the middle of texas
listening to a man
on the radio tell the story
of two brothers falling
from a high rise: one
survives, the other does
what you’d expect,
& i am lying on my back
listening for the sound
of skin against pavement,
for the radio to start
spilling over its limbs
& every place i’ve ever lived
was a desert once & will
become desert again: i call
my brother just to hear him
breathing & he’s an empty
sound, a scythe knifing still air:
how you can look back
on a life & see only salt there
& isn’t this gravity: the planet
sprinting through blackness
while i listen to another man
grieve his dead, knowing
my own brother might outlive me,
his voice a stone falling
through the line, landing
somewhere wet inside me
& outside my window
in the middle of texas
in the middle of the street
two boys in matching greek
jackets stumble drunk
through the dark, arms
desperate for the other,
bearing their terrible closeness,
fighting god to stay erect.

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when i was born i felt nothing
but life ripping open before me,
the doctor’s white face & coat,
everyone seemed happy i was alive.

but life ripping open before me
led to me ripped open before life.
everyone seemed happy. i was alive
but only for a short time.

me ripped open. before life
i was dependent on milk & men
but only for a short time.
anything can be a drug if you love it.

dependent on milk & men
my overdose a slow child inside me
anyone can be a drug if you love him
all i needed was time.

my overdose a slow-growing child
my man a cancer of light
he said all i needed was time
he left me & i tried to leave life.

my man. my cancer light.
my doctor’s white face & coat.
he left me, my life
when i was born i felt everything

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Here is an interview with Sam Sax mainly about his most recent works!

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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.
¤

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.

¤
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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This is a Video of Sam Sax reciting his poem Lisp. I think this is really interesting because the whole poem is an alliteration making it very difficult to recite.

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i’m interested in death rituals.

maybe that’s a weird thing to say.

when i say interested i mean,

i’ve compiled a list.

on it are mourning practices

gathered across time & continents

it’s long & oddly comforting

how no one knows a damn thing

about what follows. i wont

share it with you, only say,

evidence suggests neanderthals

were the first hominids to bury

their dead. also, i’ll say they

didn’t possess a written language,

which points toward internment

as a form of document. the body

is ink in the earth. the grave marker,

a gathering together of text.

the first written languages were

pictorial & marked the movement

of goods between peoples.

i don’t know what to do with that

but pretend death’s a similar kind

of commerce: face stamped

into a coin, what’s left of the body

in the belly of a bird, two lines

that meet to make a man

alive again on paper. i know i know,

ashes to ashes & all that dust

to irreverent dust. i know everyone

i love who’s dead didn’t actually

become the poem i wrote about them.

their breath a caught fathered

object thrashing in the white space

between letters. contrary to popular

belief elephants don’t actually bury

their dead lacking the necessary

shovels & opposable thumbs rather

they are known to throw leaves

& dirt upon the deceased & this

is a kind of language. often the tusks

from dead elephants are scrivened

into the shapes of smaller elephants

& sold to travelers who might display

this tragic simulacrum upon

their mantel as a symbol of power

& of passage. when i’m gone, make me again

from my hair. carry me with you

a small book in your pocket.

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what will be left after the last fidget

spinner’s spun its last spin

after the billboards accrue their thick

layer of grit masking advertisements

for teeth paste & tanqueray gin

after the highways are overtaken

by invasive forests

after the ministers give up their gods

& the rabbis their congregations

for drink

after new men rise to lead us sheep

toward our shearing, to make bed

sheets from our hair

after the high towers have no airplanes

to warn away & instead blink purely

toward heaven like children

with one red eye

after phone lines do nothing

but cut the sky into sheet music

& our phones are just expensive

bricks of metal & glass

after our cloud of photographs collapses

& all memories retreat back

into their privatized skulls

after the water taps gasp out their final

blessing

what then?

when even the local militias run

out of ammunitions

when the blast radii have been

chalked & the missiles do all they were

built to

when us jews have given up our state

for that much older country of walking

& then that even older religion of dirt

when all have succumbed to illness

inside the church of our gutted pharmacies

when the seas eat their cities

when the ground splits like a dress

when the trash continent in the mid-atlantic

at last opens its mouth to spit

what will be left after we’ve left

i dare not consider it

instead dance with me a moment

late in this last extinction

that you are reading this

must be enough