bury it

by Sam Sax

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.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Gay, Nonfiction, Adult, 21st Century

88 pages, Paperback

First published September 4, 2018

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

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

what the FUCK this book is so good

[Vivian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Powerful and understated: the anger, grief, and disassociation--a hovering above as witness. Hydrophobia and Weather Underground were two of my favorites. The collection of poems are evocative testaments, touching eulogies, from the gay male perspective.

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Buried inside these turbulent and tragic elegies are the sorrows so often borne in silence by queer or questioning youth. The unearthing and examination of these root causes of untimely death among at-risk kids forms a terrifying necrology, an urgent inquest into the violence perpetrated by a society still harboring hostility toward otherness. What Sax does herein is a holy ceremony, a kaddish that does not mourn but praise.

[anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

a little silly tragic collection containing poems about the growing pains, the pains of growing up gay, the growing meaning learning about dying, and an ode to the butthole

[KW · Rating 3 out of 5]

The more poetry I try to read, the more anxious I get about not getting it. Normally in formally playful novels I understand the space between the lines, but I really struggle to get why the words are cut like this in poems. I like Sax's thoughts on elegies and memory, and I reckon some of my friends would love this, but personally, it didn't make me linger.

[Chiari · Rating 3 out of 5]

„why not eat the hand
that feeds you, i think,
why not eat the arm,
the elbow,
the shoulder? why
not eat the whole
damned body alive.
“

[Miles Edwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was expecting to fall in love with this book...it seemed to have all the right ingredients and, after reading the first poem, I was certain this was going to be a new favourite. However, this is a 3.5 for me and I feel that my high expectations harmed this book. There’s a lot about Bury It that I loved, for starters the language is sublime.

I prayed for a different kind
of puberty: skin transforming into floor boards
muscles into cobwebs, growing pain sounding
like an attic groaning under the weight of old
photo albums...

There were so many moments such as this one where I felt utterly taken aback by such perfect yet unique imagery. The themes of queerness, faith, nature, grief, and death are beautifully and rawly handled, and there are recurring motifs that make each poem feel interconnected and integral to one another, forming one whole picture.

My favourite poems are Bildungsroman, Ultrasound, Essay on Crying in Public, Missing Persons, Synonyms for Raw, I Want So Desperately to be Finished, The Official Cause For Death, Silent Auction, Treyf, Naubade, Objectophile, Poem About Water, Impermanence, I.35, Gay Boys & The Bridges who Love Them, and Will.

I know that sounds like a lot of positives but I didn’t love this collection. A lot of the poems, despite being perfectly constructed and imbued with striking imagery and language, didn’t hit home for me. Sometimes there didn’t seem to be a focus, the poems didn’t always feel like they were flowing from one to another, making a jarring reading experience where I was in one moment in awe of Sax’s talent and deeply moved, to the next moment feeling like I was just reading pretty words that didn’t move me at all.

I may need to reread this and see how it makes me feel then. I want to fall in love with this book but as of right now, I’m in love with parts of it and borderline indifferent about others.

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a bit of a swing-and-a-miss for me. I can see how these poems could be powerful for the right reader, but I guess I'm not that reader.

Bildungsroman
i never wanted to grow up to be anything horrible
as a man. my biggest fear was the hair they said
would burst from my chest, swamp trees
breathing as i ran. i prayed for a different kind
of puberty: skin transforming into floor boards,
muscle 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.


Fun fact that is not relevant: I'm a touch-typer, and my fingers are convinced that there's a T after the R so I now think of this book as "Burty It."

[BookChampions · Rating 4 out of 5]

With poem titles like "Gay Boys and the Bridges who Love Them," I knew Bury It was going to be a heartbreaker. And the best poems were the saddest ones—elegies and protest poems about those who have died, especially young queer men.

Bury It isn't as cohesive as his last collection, Madness, but it's equally visceral and guttural. These poems wail and weep and sometimes wonder, but I'm glad I read this, even if I had a bit of heartache along the way.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are rough, edgy poems. The volume is divided into five sections, all to do with a kind of bridge, but these bridges seem more broken than connecting. The book begins with an elegy for the poet's dead lover. There are many poems in it that mourn and honor the dead, in particular the gay dead, often by their own hand in the face of a hostile world.

There are many beautiful moments in the volume but in the end it did not speak for me. But then, I'm not the intended audience.

[Alex Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is about death and burying and what it means to be in love or trying to find that and about the way we go about life. You may say that sounds grandiose and boring, but you'd be way off base.

There's something about the way sam sax takes language and makes it new again. He takes old turns of phrases and tired stories and regular words used all the time and renvisions them. And isn't that what poetry's all about? He explores what burying means and how we live life in that shadow and consistently gives new images to reframe what people feel in the "human experience."

What I'm saying is sam sax is exactly my type of poet—poignant and deep without being completely inscrutable. Sometimes he's a little too sexual, but it works most of the time. My top favorites were "Hydrophobia" and "Politics of Elegy".

[bella]

finally got my pass to the queer liberation library and this was the first book that caught my eye!

truthfully, this is the first poetry collection i’ve read recently that wasn’t trying to be something its not. i was drawn to every single word. but, I won't lie when I got to the poem titled 'butthole' my brain short-circuited.

intereested in reading more from this author.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

! going to be getting right back to this one, sam a quality piece, I was thinking like Richard scott's stuff. only they're in the bay area babey . anyway some of my favourite gay/elegies here, body bo(d)y body. some these poems I took pictures of to work with later as reference. Also impressed with the double page spread of the poems 'butthole' & 'buttplug' which're both super nice / the way

[silas denver melvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

knew going in sax wouldn't disappoint. familiar already with many pieces but delighted by ones new to me

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5⭐️
.
.
“Let me tell you about water, it feeds you as it feeds, without it you die, without you it’s fine.
Let me tell you about water, how it is a grave & vacant lot, how when it gets too hot, it disappears”
.
.
.
Sam Sax is a queer jewish writer and poet and his 2017 collection “Bury It” was the winner of the James Laughlin award from the academy of American poets. It’s a very strong and heartfelt reflection on the lives of gay men and also their deaths, their feeling of not being accepted by anything except death. It becomes a desire and he bares the grim bones of it on these 80 pages. The mostly bleak words offer a respite and a mediation on mortality and end up showing the greatness of actually being alive. He shows readers his “interrogation of the bridges we cross, the bridges we burn, and bridges we must leap from” and ultimately creates a “Kaddish that does not mourn but praise” .

[honeybean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This book of poems was so incredibly relatable, truthful, and beautiful. I honestly feel like I went through this book feeling all the feels - I can be laughing in one moment (Buttplug) and crying the next (Silent Auction) and snapping my fingers/relating the next (Poem about Water; Service)

I want to recommend this to everyone, but it may wreck you (in the best way).

[Matthew Mastricova · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book destroyed me.

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

i really want to read more poetry! it’s such a beautiful form of writing. this was a heart wrenching collection, but there was such beauty in its careful and rage-full word choice.

[Maggie Boone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. This collection is tough, incredibly sad, and dark. I saw a fellow reviewer say they have anxiety about not getting it and I agree to an extent, lol. There were definitely a number of poems I’d like to go back to and reread because I’m not sure I completely got them. These poems are beautifully written and Sam Sax is so talented. I think it is necessary to read from writers with completely different life experiences then my own and these were harrowing. I definitely want to come back to this collection and dive a little deeper.

[Carl Waluconis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has a curious cover with three children dressed nicely posing in a pink triangle, and they all have very realistic animal heads. With this whimsical intro, the poems inside are intense and gripping. Their main topic is the large number of suicides of young gay men. The poems are carefully crafted even delicate language structures, with contrasting content that is frank and unsparring. The mood is critical, as the poet searches for ways to try to live in a brutalizing world.

[Ery Caswell · Rating 4 out of 5]

an elegy for the epidemic of young gay men & boys who killed themselves specifically in the summer of 2010 but then again & before & hereafter. bury it: grief, trauma, fists, another corpse. I very much appreciate poetry that manages to balance thematic weight, 'literary' substance, rigorous wordplay & accessibility of language. I do need something a bit lighter for my next read. some critics on the back say this is a celebration of resilience. I'm not so sure about that

[Jaci Millette Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, wow, wow, what an arresting collection. Almost all of Sax’s opening poems are vivid and evocative. My favorites are Will, Bildungsroman, Ultrasound, New God of an Antique War, Risk, MDMA, and Meat. I get giddy when devour a good poem only to discover myself to be enveloped in an equally enticing stanza on the next page, followed by another and another. Sax’s lines sizzle in these poems that deal with identity, sexuality, intimacy, grief, while somehow being playful and bleak all at once.

[emonorwid · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is so insanely good. obsessed

[this_eel · Rating 5 out of 5]

For if you really want to feel fucked up

[Carla]

Raw, intense poems….these heartbreakers will stay with me.

[Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uncommonly personal subjects. Provoking thought from so many angles.

[André Habet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was listening to bell hooks talk in a lecture recently about a thing James Baldwin used to say about hating sentimentality for how its dishonesty, its avoidance of deeper truths. In Sax's poems, I see this orientation away from sentimentality as he gets towards new depths of understanding himself and the world as he experiences it whether its about the way that queer men relate to each other over the internet, in the bedroom, to their families, or thinking through how little we understand about the world, the impact of our actions on ecologies, and the miracle of butt plugs. Love this. think you will too.

[Fredore Praltsa · Rating 1 out of 5]

He's brave, which is good, but I wish he were more fearful—not of his topics (Grindr, STIs, sex work, suicide), which deserve attention, but of the risks of writing about them carelessly. Again and again, he narrativizes and dramatizes what would better be simply represented. Reality is striking enough. (In fact, isn't that the point?) Egregious lines include when his speaker says that each second passing as a body plummets from a bridge "is its own poem."

[Jasmine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I really enjoyed and understood probably 3 of the poems in this collection? It read like a schizophrenic ramble of thoughts which I really couldn’t decipher. Maybe that says more about my ability as an English major than about Sax’s writing style.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jesus CHRIST that was good. If you like Richard Siken’s poetry—or raw, brutally honest, yet tender poetry in general—then this is the collection for you.