Straight

by Sam Sax

sam sax is a 2015 NEA Fellow and finalist for The Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He’s a poetry Fellow at The Michener Center for Writers where he serves as the Editor-in-chief of Bat City Review. He’s a two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion and author of the chapbooks, A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters (Button Poetry, 2014), sad boy / detective (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and All The Rage (SRP, 2016). His poems are forthcoming in Boston Review, FIELD, Ploughshares, PEN Poetry Series, Poetry Magazine, and other journals. “The best poems sizzle with an urgent darkness. This is a young poet to watch.” Marilyn Chin “In sam sax’s STRAIGHT the wound and the salve seem to disguise themselves as one another—as the sweet high, as the lovely low, as the addiction to power and the relief of being nothing. sax stripped me to my cells, to my neurological need to be seen and the fear that I am. Bare and bright, these forms resist formulas, these pauses are syntax and synapse, these griefs are the new mouths that sing the snake back in. These poems are the prescription for the animal in us, and for what’s in us that is unshaken by chemistry—for the god in us, or what god put there by wafer, by word, by flesh, by chemical flame.” Traci Brimhall “The poems here in STRAIGHT are like a legion of pickpockets, hustlers after all our secrets, but their collective con is a con done out of a love of the world—all of it. All these ways of insisting we face even what we think we hate. Everything sax and his poems steals from you with this book, you never needed—it was only in the way.” Alexander Chee

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

33 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

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

[Kelsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A pure, concentrated hit of poetic inquiry, seamlessly morphing into reflection. So much is happening in this book. One of the things sax does really well here is examine those experiences we typically leave unexamined, mysterious, especially in poetry. Drugs are anything but an escape in "Straight," or if they do allow for a moment of escape, reality is not far behind. Much of the beauty in these poems comes from the slivers of life that ground the poet-speaker's pipe dreams, and the ways they are altered when experienced in this new light.