Both Monster and Landscape
Review of bury it by sam sax (USA: Wesleyan University Press, 2018)
by Max Pasakorn
As a young gay poet living in Singapore, my options for gay content that I can relate to are unfortunately limited. Although I have been inhaling Cyril Wong’s and Ng Yi-Sheng’s poetry with the speed that I reserve for the boneless chicken wings at Wingstop, I sometimes wish for a book that brings my experience as a 23-year-old gay man to the forefront—poems that depict the youthful lust of sex and the threat of sexually transmitted infections; poems that echo the mental health issues bogging down this generation; and poems that make being in love feel like a ready-made curse we are all meant to bear. I am fortunate enough to read sam sax’s sophomore collection, bury it, a book that not only checks all these boxes, but also does so with technical finesse. It is the winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.
The sinister cover of the book, showing three anthropomorphic animals dressed in children’s clothes, already hints at the menace that lurks beneath the veneer of queer equality in present-day America. The first poem in the collection, "Will," forms itself around the image of a fisherman who reels in boys with various objects in their possession: “homophones, cartilage, pheromones” and “telephones, specula, seraphim." What makes the poem breathtaking is its use of refrain: as the fisherman “feels something bite below the river" he "pulls up boy,/ after boy,/ after boy.” The repetition continues and bleeds along the full length of the next page, giving the impression that these boys are disposable, as if the fisherman looks forward to discarding them after making use of them—sexually or otherwise. The line “an adrenal needle plunged into the heart” both evokes the rhythmic sound of the heartbeat in the refrain and alludes to questions of health and medication. Since fishing typically results in the death of the fish, "Will" uses the refrain to conjure up a mass of dead bodies to dissect. These dead boys bring with them a flood of tragic stories to unravel. What impresses me most is the poem's ability to summarize subtly the key themes of the book. Countermanding the directive in its title, this book is not so much about the burial of narrative, as it is about the exhumation of multitudes.
The second poem in the collection, "Bildungsroman," explores the persona’s identity and their experience of growing up. In the poem, the persona's fear is an emotion so total in its feeling that it bleeds from the confines of the body, turning the persona into both monster and landscape: “my biggest fear was the hair they said would snake from my chest, swamp trees breathing as i ran.” Paradoxically this fear is also an adolescent wish to be different from others, and so be special: “skin transforming into floor boards/ muscles into cobwebs, growing pains sounding/ like an attic groaning under the weight of/ old photo albums.” The description of the body as a haunted house involves the family in a twisted development. At the end of the poem, the persona’s brother, who has “hairless arms,” whispers to the father: “dad it will be a monster / we should bury it.” Other than the nod to the collection's title, "Bildungsroman" suggests that to grow up as queer is to grow up monstrous, in the eyes of family and friends. It is an experience that resonates with many young queer people in Singapore and elsewhere.
While most poems in bury it touch on death in some way, what I find enchanting about “Risk” is how sax weds death to sex in this poem. "Risk” begins with a thought that I now recall each time I tear open the packaging of a new condom: “how harrowing the paradox of latex. on one hand the paragon of intimacy. on the other a glove like a father loved more in his absence.” The poem is honest in a way not usually found between gay friends: sex with the same partner can feel much less exciting as time goes by, or as sax puts it, “how the forbidden fruit grows less sweet the more you gorge on it.” In this poem, the persona invokes the notion of discourse to analyze the subject of unprotected sex, breaking down precisely how sexual thrills lies in transgression. “The distance between theory + practice is a slick laceration,” the poem argues, “It’s right there in the name, unprotected, to be laid out before the animal in him, to be defenseless + deforested.” Used in place of “and” or the more hip “&,” the “+” sign is more than a conjunction; it is a soundless reminder of the risk of becoming HIV positive that accompanies unprotected sex. "Risk" concludes with a grim take on death: “a handful of gravel, the open ground,/ a groveling mouth, a grave half full of water/ with my body not in it yet.” "Risk" reads like a stern warning against raw sex, but it also presents an unavoidable truth—as long as the pleasure of sex exists, so does the underlying premise of eventual death.
Although sax touches on many heavy topics in the book, he also infuses them with irreverent humor. "Butthole," for instance, is an ode that celebrates the anus by comparing it to a “putrid rose” and a “small hungry prince.” This poem is juxtaposed with the next called "Buttplug," which makes little digs at the sex toy with intimate knowledge won from practice (“i paid extra/ so you’d feel like skin”) even as it celebrates its capacity for bringing pleasure ("little globe-shaped thing/ you are the world"). In "Poem About Water," sax pokes fun at how so many poets use water as an image for romance—“i get it, your body is blah blah blah percent water. oceans levitate, clouds urinate on the ground that grows our food.” sax emphasizes his sarcasm by presenting a scene of three boys drowning, who “came up white and soft as plastic grocery bags”. By showing that water, too, could be a cause of death, sax subverts water's romantic appeal and alludes to the many unexplored possibilities about water in poetry. These poems feel like a welcome breath of fresh air and do a great job of showcasing the range in sax’s voice.
sax's rich metaphors and densely layered style distinguishes his writing from other young, queer, American voices such as that of Chen Chen, who use very easily recognizable images, and from queer Singaporean voices such as Ng Yi-Sheng. For instance, Chen Chen’s poem about growing up, “Race to the Tree,” is starkly different from sax’s "Bildungsroman.” Chen uses a very personal voice and a straightforward narrative to describe the process of growing up to win the reader into his confidence (“I was 13 & wouldn’t have/ said it so succinctly, but I knew something/ about the sadness of the facts”). This approach differs from sax's poetry, whose shifting metaphors require time to slowly unravel. Similarly, sax’s engagement with illness in "Risk" seems more metaphorical when compared to Yi-Sheng’s poem “Stomach,” which employs a matter-of-fact tone (“He slept with me last year./ Now he has cancer.”). The subtle figures in sax’s book, like his themes, require some exhumation and the operation turns up many pleasant surprises.
The fluffball of energy known as Max Pasakorn (he/him) is a queer Thai-born writer and spoken word poet residing in Singapore. He exists in the bizarre intersection between a slut for beauty products and a nerd for board games. He will soon matriculate into Yale-NUS College to study Liberal Arts.