Sam Sax
Sam Sax is a queer, jewish, poet & educator. They're the author of Bury It (winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American poets) and Madness (winner of the National Poetry Series). They're the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Granta, Buzzfeed and elsewhere. They've received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and Lambda Literary. Currently living in Oakland California, and working at a used bookstore, they'll be a lecturer at Stanford University this Fall. Source
Everyone’s an Expert at Something
The more i learn the more i learn
i don’t know what the [ ] i’m talking
about. To someone who doesn’t care
a fig for poetry they’d likely think
i knew a lot, yet in most bookshops
i’m lost, shelves heavy with the bodies
of forgotten writers. It’s relative.
a president can say audacity or
a president can say sad & both eat
the cured meat of empire. When i say
i carry my people inside me i don’t
mean a country. The star that hangs
from my neck is simply a way
of saying israel is not a physical place
but can be carried anywhere. It says
my people are most beautiful when
moving when movement, when
our only state is the liquid state of water,
is adapting to our container. Homeland
sometimes just means what books
you’ve read, what stories you’ve spread
with your sneakers. My people,
any place you live long enough
to build bombs is a place you’ve lived
too long–it’s relative. My friends,
the only thing I know for sure is
the missiles on television are only beautiful
if you’ve never known suffering.
My friends the only country i will
ever pledge my allegiance to
is your music, is under investigation
for treason.
Published:
2019
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2024
Themes:
Agency
Intersectionality & Culture
Poems of Place
Violence & War
Literary Devices:
Anaphora
a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences
Antanaclasis
The repetition of a word within a phrase, in which the second use of the word utilizes a different and sometimes contrary meaning from the first.
Internal Rhyme
A rhyme involving a word in the middle of a line and another at the end of the line or in the middle of the next.
Polyptoton
The use of multiple words with the same root in different forms.
Slant Rhyme
A rhyme where the words have similar sounds in their stressed syllables.
Symbolism
a word, object, action, character, or concept that embodies and evokes a range of additional meaning and significance.