Sam Sax, _Bury It_

I HAD PASSING doubts about this as I was reading it, but it kept defeating those doubts.

What doubts? you may be wondering. First, the cover notes that Sax was "two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion," and while I often enjoy slam performances, it seems to me that the urgency and rhythmic invention of a good slam performance typically fail to make their way onto the printed page. They succeed in this case, though.

was it the times, was it the tyrants,
was it the man murdered in his bed
besides his wife, the price of food,
the burning rubber forests, the boys
sent across the world to die?

 ("The Weather Underground")

While I imagine that passage would be riveting in performance, it is also riveting to read: a concise summary of the events that might have radicalized youth politics circa 1969--the death of (I assume) Fred Hampton, Vietnam--lit up with alliteration, headlong syntax, the imagery of the brutality of authority.

Second, as I mentioned in passing in the previous post, Sax often writes about edgy life circumstances: taking drugs, selling drugs, selling one's body, unprotected sex, sex with strangers, unprotected sex with strangers, suicide. Now, some writers who deal with edgy, transgressive content entrust the whole labor of creating readerly interest to that same edgy, transgressive content. That is, they seem to feel that because they are providing a glimpse of a world grimly fascinating in and of itself, they are under no obligation to pay attention to style or structure, to be original, to be nuanced. I don't want to mention any names--it's just that I was just briefly worried that Sax was going to let himself coast in this fashion. He does not.

The five main sections of the books are titled "Rope," "Draw," "Stone," "Toll," and "Suspension," which after a while I realized are all different kinds of bridge, an image I then realized figures several places in the book as a way of suggesting both connection and separation, and furthermore is a frequent site of suicide. The instance of Tyler Clementi, the young gay cyber-bullied man who jumped off the George Washington Bridge, is remembered in "Surveillance," those of many other young gay men in "Gay Boys & the Bridges Who Love Them" and "Bridges" (about the Golden Gate Bridge), and, somewhat surprisingly, that of John Berryman, who leapt from the Washington Avenue Bridge connecting Minneapolis and St. Paul in 1972, in "Objectophile" ("the man stretched  / between two cold cities").

(Sax also has a poem about the collapse of the I-35W bridge between Minneapolis and Saint Paul; as a midwesterner, I am grateful that he did not decide to mention the east coast bridge and the west coast bridge and leave it at that.)

The book's opening poem, one of two titled "Will," imagines the drowned bodies of the suicides brought to the surface, as a fisherman "feels something bite below the river / & pulls up boy, / after boy, / after boy, / [...]". The phrase "after boy" is repeated fifty times, an effect that must be unnerving in performance, when the audience would not be able to simply turn the page and skip to the end.

The book is dedicated "for my family / blood & otherwise." That "otherwise" is picked up later ("my family in under surveillance. / the king / must die") and suggests the new queer sensibility in American letters is stepping out of zine-and-chapbook world and into the prizes-and-endowed-chairs world. But Sax, having once hustled, might see becoming an established poet as just another hustle: "i was paid a thousand dollars for writing a poem about a dead man who hated me / i was paid and each dollar is a ghost haunting my wallet" ("Politics of Elegy").