Deathbed Sext

by Christopher Salerno

Winner of the 2019 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook PrizeIn the title poem, Christopher Salerno writes, “I want to waltz with you away from what// once was monstrously male/ about me and I also/ want to survive.” The and here is crucial, and emblematic of the collection, which poem after poem says yes, and. Yes, high and low culture. Yes, both sext and ghost as nouns “you can verb.” Yes, loving and leaving. Yes, familiar and strange; dead serious and absurd. “Everything is a piece of something else,” Salerno writes, and everything gets to stay, because these deftly crafted poems are elastic enough to hold it all. — Maggie Smith, Contest Judge and author of Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Lamp of the Body The title nabbed me, the sext trope hooked me, but the poems—the poems—far exceed the nab and the hook. Numinous, masterfully crafted, rife with allusion, Salerno’s lines mark the page with a surgical precision and delicacy. He pins back the flaps of masculinity, its privilege and its vulnerability, its lewdness and its fear, the unarticulated wound of it, “how some bruises/flower, spread like steam on the mirror/blurring all beauty.” Without false heroics or glibness, Salerno enacts his own sexted “May we become/to bravery what saying is to the sentence.” — Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

31 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

BIO:
Christopher Salerno is the author of five books of poetry. His new book, “The Man Grave,” won the Lexi Rudnitsky Award from Persea Books and is available now. Previous books include “Sun & Urn” (UGA Poetry Prize), “ATM” (Georgetown Poetry Prize), “Minimum Heroic” (Mississippi Review Poetry Prize), and “Whirligig.” From 2016-2021, he served as the editor of Saturnalia Books. His trade book, “How to Write Poetry: A Guided Journal,” was published by Calisto Media in 2020. His poetry has received the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, The Founders Prize from RHINO Magazine, the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Award, the Laurel Review Chapbook Prize, and a New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowship. His poems have appeared in New York Times Magazine, New Republic, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Jubilat, and elsewhere. He teaches Creative Writing at William Paterson University in New Jersey where he serves as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum. Visit him at www.csalernopoet.com

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poet Christopher Salerno has flourishes of words throughout this book that you might remember. I especially liked, “Personify desire only when love threatens to do less.” I find a lot of examples of dissonance in the pages of this book. It’s unique, and worth the read.