bury it
4.5/5
()
About this ebook
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.
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.
Read more from George Monbiot
Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Yr Dead Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pig: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Age of Consent Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to bury it
Related ebooks
i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Crushing It Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSpace Struck Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When the Ghosts Come Ashore Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Burning Sugar Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Soft Science Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beast at Every Threshold Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Disintegrate/Dissociate Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inheritance Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Said The Manic To The Muse Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Every Day We Get More Illegal Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5So, Stranger Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5blud Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5They Don't Kill You Because They're Hungry, They Kill You Because They're Full Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Verging Cities Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Splinters Are Children of Wood: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Price of Scarlet: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMoon Jar: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wilder Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Thrown in the Throat Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sea Summit: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bones Below Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fortunately Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5New Shoes On A Dead Horse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5River House: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Ephemera Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Floating, Brilliant, Gone Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Literary Criticism For You
A Reader’s Companion to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Seduction: by Robert Greene | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/512 Rules For Life: by Jordan Peterson | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 48 Laws of Power: by Robert Greene | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Great Alone: by Kristin Hannah | Conversation Starters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Man's Search for Meaning: by Viktor E. Frankl | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5As I Lay Dying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killers of the Flower Moon: by David Grann | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Verity: by Colleen Hoover | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Letters to a Young Poet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Virtues Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain | Conversation Starters Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis | Conversation Starters Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBehold a Pale Horse: by William Cooper | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.by Brené Brown | Conversation Starters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gone Girl: A Novel by Gillian Flynn | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Between the World and Me: by Ta-Nehisi Coates | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Reviews for bury it
2 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
bury it - George Monbiot
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