A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters

by Sam Sax

Sam Sax’s A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters, a runner up for the 2013 Button Poetry Prize.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer, Fiction, Monsters

46 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2014

About the author

sam sax is a queer, jewish, writer and educator. They're the author of PIG (2023, Scribner) and Yr Dead (2024, McSweeney’s), as well as 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 and stories published in The New York Times, Granta, The Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. Sam's received fellowships from  The NEA, Poetry Foundation, MacDowell, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University

Reviews

[Gerhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Phantasmagoria’ is a good description of this collection. The writing is both curiously tender and violent. My favourite is a series of poem snippets falling under the collective title of ‘Bestiary’. While I’m not always sure exactly what Sam Sax is writing about all of the time, his verse invariably unnerves and/or unsettles the reader. I was often tempted to go back to previous poems, which meant I probably ended up reading this collection twice. This is a dark and twisted road that lures the reader into a journey fraught with despair and desire.

[anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

(james flint voice) "they paint the world full of shadows... and then tell their children to stay close to the light. their light. their reasons, their judgments. because in the darkness, there be dragons."

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I swear Sam Sax is writing and storying and sensing at a vibrational plane higher or lower or elsewhere than the rest of us. Holy hell. Every poempiece here has taken me out and beaten me bloody and that is actually fine with me. I cannot put into words the quality of these works, of this collection, nor the raw rage, pain, and power emanating from every entry.

If you exist, imagine me throwing this book at you. My gd.

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

"what is your mouth but a home, but a haunted motel, but a siren of terrible righteous noise." -It's Alive!

Enjoyed the collection very much. Definitely will seek out more sam sax

[Mateo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sure I would have thought this was good when I was 16.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

I absolutely adore the relationship between queerness and monsters; there’s something utterly powerful about seeing the ways in which we find ourselves tied to monstrosity. So, considering this, it admittedly came as a disappointment that I didn’t enjoy this as much as I thought I would. Don’t get me wrong, there were some great poems nestled in the pages, but not nearly enough to make me gush over this collection. I can’t quite tell if it was the way a lot of these poems were formatted (and, in some cases, worded) that made it hard for me to follow along or what, but a lot of them fell short.

I do want to focus on the poems I did enjoy, though. In the series that he titles “Bestiary,” he shows tender love towards for various monsters from Western culture in vignette-like lines for each supposed atrocity. Two other poems that stood out to me were “The Hunger Artist” and “It’s Alive!” There was something so visceral about “The Hunger Artist” that I found hypnotizing. I will say that all of his poems will give you a visceral reaction due to how he uses horror throughout this collection, but something about this poem really struck me in its intimacy with queerness. “It’s Alive!” felt like the centerpiece of the collection, starting the poem with some thought-provoking words: “try & watch a horror film from the point of view of the monster.” It’s rousing and eerie, a challenge with hints of grief as Sax goes head-to-head with his queerness and the way it’s perceived. This is what you’ll find throughout this collection, and I can’t help but wonder if it would have made more sense to put this poem at the start to set the tone.

Sax does a delightful job tackling horror in every sense of the word, to the point that it will make some readers squirm. It’s a unique, maybe even refreshing, approach to queerness and monstrosity that you don’t come across very often. It’s not often that I’ll say this poetry collection isn’t for the faint of heart.

[Psychotic · Rating 2 out of 5]

I understand poetry can't always be literal, but somehow there is part, I do understand what it meant, and the other part I need chatgpt to explain behind every word it says. I like probably 2 or 3, but if I can't rhyme it or understand it, it loses my imaginary mind of not knowing what it means.

[ink · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Bestiary, How to Spell Reductive, When Researching Public Sex Theaters for a Poem, Fishing, Heavy Petting, Hands)

[bubble butt book lover · Rating 4 out of 5]

theres some absolutely phenomenal trans poetry in here

[Anka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Violent, rhythmical. Favourite line:

“to the appropriate gods. i've
knelt for years
at a time before
strange medicine
cabinets,

swallowed entire beehives for a
single
drop of honey. after all the
opium
has been burned
from the water,
after the smoke clears over this
faming
apiary of a home, know you
will only be left
with what you were
born.”

[BookChampions · Rating 4 out of 5]

sam sax's 2014 collection A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters is a gritty, unflinching, and sometimes painful look at queer male coming of age. It's a tough read—both for its content and its wildly abstract imagery. But it was easy to understand in these poems the failings of traditional masculinity to initiate our sons into a healthy and responsible manhood. This commentary is in able hands by sax—bold, shocking, confident, and free. This is a captivating book of poems, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Bury It very soon.

Here's the opening line to my favourite poem in the collection, "It's Alive:"

try & watch a horror film
from the point of view
of the monster. imagine,
every man shrieks at the
sight of you, children throw
stones & laugh at your
blood, a mob forms on your
doorstep with pitchforks
& forceps just for fun or for
fear. this is your wretched
life. you didn’t know your
name until they named
you. didn’t know your teeth
were fangs until they tried to
pry them from your pliant
skull, didn’t know your
hunger was so unclean.

[Angele · Rating 4 out of 5]

[This review first appeared in Weave Magazine.]

Where The Wild Things Are: A Review of Sam Sax’s A Guide To Undressing Your Monsters by Angele Ellis

A Guide To Undressing Your Monsters by Sam Sax
Button Poetry/Exploding Pine Cone Press (2014)

Reviewed by Angele Ellis

Each section of Sam Sax’s first poetry book—a runner-up in the 2013 Button Poetry/Exploding Pine Cone Contest—ends with a drawing of a monster undressing itself. Akiva Levi’s illustrations, reminiscent of Maurice Sendak, reveal the monster to be an ordinary boy—but a boy whose melancholy face is faded and incomplete, as if lost in the clouds of his own and the world’s making.

Like Sendak, Sax is a gay Jewish man haunted by his cultural and historical past, and seeking illumination and redemption in art. Unlike Sendak, the myths that Sax explores and recreates are not for children but for adults, and their wrenching transformations promise no resolution.

Variations and continuations of one poem, “Bestiary,” begin the five sections of A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters. The fabulous beasts that Sax catalogues become, in the poet’s intense and sometimes violent imagery, lovers whose intimacies are fraught with danger. Beware the lover/monster most when he is sleeping, as Sax seems to be saying in the following passage from the first “Bestiary,” because of what may happen when he awakens:

werewolf—

… / go to sleep / beside the man you love
& wake up next to a dog / maybe the moon brought it out of him /
… / or maybe
it was there inside him / howling all along

The poems that follow each “Bestiary” are lyrics of sexual longing and initiation that carry, along with the urgency of desire, the knife’s edge of potential destruction and even disgust. (Sax uses this word twice in the same poem, and synonymously in a number of others.) In “When Researching Public Sex Theatres for a Poem,” the very seats of the theatre are repositories of viral guilt, as in Sax’s pungent description:

… who uses cloth seats anymore, anyway?
you read they hold disease better than mosquitoes,
feel the swarm beneath you as you sit,

each tiny needle sucking you down.

In “Fishing,” the knife is figurative and literal. Sax’s adolescent narrator and his friend Daniel, with whom he is infatuated, butcher still-living fish from the ocean as bait to catch more. The process is both seductive and brutal, as in this passage:

…fish don’t have throats to cut, so we stabbed
wildly. my first knife, bright as a smile, sectioned their
seizing bodies. my smile, my knife.

That night, sleeping in Daniel’s mother’s house, the narrator “want[s] so badly / to be a knife… to take [Daniel] / apart in pieces” after he has “… in the dark… [run] my fingers through / his hair, brought them to my face and tasted salt.” “Fishing” becomes a vivid fantasy of lovemaking and completion in the final lines of the poem, as follows:

…or perhaps, i wanted to take him
into my mouth, to feel something sharp
break inside of me,
to be pulled up
into the screaming air
somehow whole.

The fruitful consummation of love between men is woven into “Folktale,” a rich and humorous prose poem written after Marge Piercy, but also with the flavor of Issac Bashevis Singer. It is told in the voice of the narrator’s “zedee… from her creaking wood body buried in her creaking wood chair.” In the grandmother’s words, the proximity required by sleeping bodies in the bitter Ukrainian winter creates more than children:

… i don’t know if you know this sam but when two men make
love, they also make bread, the slow yeast and butter, yolks
breaking in the hand, sugar poured until it makes you sick…
you know the older the man the richer the bread, so hashem
rose the body temperature of these men until they all sang
like ovens. they labored indoors and birthed perfect loaves.
that winter, we ate how kings eat.

But consummation also can be cannibalistic and parasitic. In the Kafkaesque “The Hunger Artist,” the body that is devoured is so similar to the narrator’s as to fuse with it permanently. The horror of this union is demonstrated in the poem’s last stanzas:

… the job of any competent
parasite is to convince

its host of their relationship’s
symbiosis…

… & when i was at last inside him,
i couldn’t make a sound.

Silence is transformed into “shrieks” from both the screen and the movie audience in the prose poem “It’s Alive!” that unreels on the page like a strip of film. Told from “the point of view / of the [gay] monster,” the poem/movie’s inevitable narrative becomes a defiant cry of pain and protest, as in these lines:

… it’s not
till you love a boy & make him
like you that you’re able
to curse the civilization
that assembled your fiction

…
… & audiences
in darkened theatres release
a collective sigh of relief
as you perish, as credits roll
back like eyes…

Sax ends A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters with a return to childhood in “Boys & Bridges.” Beneath a veneer of roughhouse and innocence, however, his boys are “gods” of “flame & melt.” The narrator knows not only where the matches are, but also where the bodies are buried. “[A] dog… below the corn. /… there because of us… once it opened / its mouth to howl & all of god’s green dirt / spilled in.” Another dead dog “spill[s] out” of a bag pulled from a river.

Although the boys burn the forest in anger, and return “home to our undrowned / dogs,” a forest of civilization rises to contain them. As Sax says in the book’s final sentence, “we’re still climbing out.”

[Charlotte Abotsi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of poems ripped me raw. The author withholds nothing: sax tackles his queerness head on, looking into the mirror, calling for the monster by name. He uses horror, most notably, the “monster,” as a means to personify the fear and hatred that comes with homophobia, both internally and outwardly.

In the series “Bestiary,” he gathers all monsters—mermaids, medusas, and molochs alike, and makes children of them. He writes from within the pulse of these monsters, unpacking sex and identity. There are so many poem in the collection that stifled my breath; made me believe I was in the horror story, or maybe, even the monster myself.

I became undone by these poems. A standout poem is “It’s Alive!” which begins: “try & watch a horror film / from the point of view of the monster.” From there, sax pulls readers into the haunted mirror with him, allowing us to step in those shoes. “You didn’t know your name / until they named you.” A funny idea that, the monster as a nameless thing, devoid of its own chant.

[Dibz · Rating 5 out of 5]

you didn't know your name until they named you. didn't know your teeth were fangs until they tried to pry them from your pliant skull, didn't know your hunger was so unclean. so you learned to grow in the dark as darkness grew in you. - from 'It's Alive!'

This was such a great collection of poems.

Sax explores themes of intimate relationships, queerness, drug abuse and masculinity through the language and images of monsters and beasts found in Hellenic, Jewish and Christian traditions.

[Noel Cisneros · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un poema que revisita la idea de monstruo a partir de la experiencia de ser el otro, en que el deseo orilla a la voz poética a ser el Otro. Lo monstruoso es tratado con ironía y con juegos que vuelven fresca la revisión que hace, a través de la serie de poemas que articulan el libro y se llaman Bestiary, monstruos clásicos del imaginario occidental (desde Medusa, Caribdis y el Cíclope hasta los zombies).

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

try & watch a horror film from the point of view of the monster. imagine, every man shrieks at the sight of you, children throw stones & laugh at your blood, a mob forms on your doorstep with pitchforks & forceps just for fun or from fear. this is your wretched life. you didn’t know your name until they named you.

Excerpt From: "A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters" by Sam Sax. Scribd.
This material may be protected by copyright.

Read this book on Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/book/341319380

[Szymon · Rating 5 out of 5]

tell me a bruise can't mean/ i love you, and i'll show you my neck / when he comes home from war.

Raw collection of poems focused on sexuality and the monstrosity assigned to queer love by society writ large. From an ode to a "Butthole" to addiction struggles in "Prescription Poppies" there is a lot there. My favourites was the throughline of popular monsters reshaped in "Bestiary", "Cruising" and "How to Spell Reductive", as well as "Hands" and "Folktale".

[Sanjana Argula · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good Button poetry book. Some great quotable lines:

"the edge and the dull back of a blade are both called knife."

" tell me a bruise can’t mean i love you, and i’ll show you my neck when he comes home from war."

" i’ve never known a man who isn’t both fist and furniture."

" all he was was eyes. the kind that roll up into the skull like a map that will burn before they show you water."

" in the land of the blind / the one-eyed man is queen"

[Shawn Aebi · Rating 3 out of 5]

As disturbing a collection as the title infers. Confronting your fears physical, psychological, emotional; real imagined or both. The poems bounce between the space monsters take up in your life and the plane on which you deal with them. Intentional shock factor setting is high and works at times but occasionally injects a "trying too hard" response. Still an easy and scintillating read.

[caramels · Rating 2 out of 5]

“but also, that there are many ways to value labor, to eat and be eaten by love. there are miracles inside us, you see this in how we are here, sam. how we survived the cold unbroken and became something else entirely, not flame, not match head with countless wood bodies, not fire escape drooling gasoline, but something that rises in the heat.”

[areej · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was so pretty but also painful!!! exploring queerness and intersectional identity and coming of age through a lens of monstrosity and violence in some ways??? kinda OUCH kinda ICONIC!! loved the bestiary poems and so much of this, the imagery is absolutely exquisite !! the whole horror of it all, very much my thing

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, this one is gooooood.

It's an amazing, heart wrenching collection of poems that cuts you open in the most delightful way possible.

I'm not feeling particularly verbose this morning, but yeah... Buy this book. And I cannot wait to read more Sam Sax.

[Jewel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm in a reading slump so I'm reading some poetry to get me back into things. Sam Sax is a good writer, but despite that, this collection isn't that memorable to me. I've already forgotten a lot of it.

[Kat G Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Usually, I struggle with prose-poems. I find them dense, like wading through molasses. But I read the ones in this collection twice over, determined not to miss any of sax’s viscerally evocative imagery. I think that says it all.

[Liz Logan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Usually I have very definite feelings about books when I finish them, but this book I feel very ambivalent about. It’s worth noting in my mind that this is one of the first poetry books of contemporary times I’ve read that is by a male author.

[Katie Pfotzer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like many poetry collections, I felt that some of the poems were really strong and others were weaker. I also think this rating is very subjective since poetry is subjective. The strongest poems were the Bestiary poems or the ones that reached back to the Ukrainian heritage of the author.

[Moa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh what a great collection! I especially found "Fishing" to be very interesting. I also liked how "Prescription Poppies" made me think of Sylvia Plath as I read the poem, only to later find out that Sam wrote it about her.

[za · Rating 4 out of 5]

amazing!! the contents of these poems are explored beautifully! “you can’t wear your mother’s clothes without becoming your mother. you can’t take on her voice without also taking her hands & throat. even boarded up in the body i am still staring out of windows.” !!!!!!

[Luke Gorham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapbooks are usually so insubstantial, but this is superior to the full-length collections of Sax's that I've read. Very linguistically flexible and conceptually tight. Have Pig sitting next me and am considerably more excited now.

[Shailee · Rating 4 out of 5]

there are many words for transformation / metamorphosis
metaphor / medication / go to sleep / beside the man you love
& wake up next to a dog / maybe the moon brought it out of him
hound hungry for blood / maybe it's your fault / or maybe
it was there inside him / howling all along