ONLY ONCE IN a while do I encounter a poet's second book and like it so much that I seek out the poet's first, and even more rarely do I actually make the time to read it, but yes, I am that big a fan of Sax's Bury It.
Madness (a National Poetry Series winner, selected by Terrance Hayes) has a lot of what made Bury It so appealing: rhythm, candor, critically-inflected (i.e., in this instance, Foucauldian) identity politics, a lyricism that the book's anger only enriches.
The poems revolve around illness, and what gets defined as illness (cf. Foucault), and cures, and what gets defined as a cure (cf. Foucault). The speaker of the poems is usually a young man up against his diagnoses, their associated cures, and the professionals in charge of administering same. A vein of humor runs through the book, but it's dark.
A design/structural feature of the book is a recurring reproduction of Appendix C of the 1952 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (which lists "Homosexuality" alongside "Acrophobia," "Pyromania," and "Tantrums") that gets methodically erased as the volume proceeds. This erasure may be a progress, but the final poem--titled, sure enough, "Erasure"--raises the fearful possibility that if you remove all the wrongs and mistakes there may not be much left.
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