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
Bildungsroman
i never wanted to grow up to be anything horrible
as a man. my biggest fear was the hair they said
would snake from my chest, swamp trees
breathing as i ran. i prayed for a different kind
of puberty: skin transforming into floor boards
muscles 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
Published:
2018
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2023
Themes:
Body & Body Image
Childhood & Coming of Age
Literary Devices:
Enjambment
a line break interrupting the middle of a phrase which continues on to the next line
Essay/Prose
written or spoken language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure
Imagery
visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work
Simile
a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”