Winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, Sam Sax's bury it meditates on death, rituals of passage, translation, desire, diaspora, and personhood, and invites the reader to interrogate the bridges we cross, the bridges we burn, and bridges we must leap from.
Sam Sax... continues to prove that he is one of the most important voices in contemporary American poetry with his second full-length collection, bury it ... Sax shows his growth as a writer and an activist, perfectly blending several well-known poems into a manuscript that feels fresh and immediate. The result is an eloquent and cathartic conversation about some of the most pervasive social issues affecting readers today.
... the pleasures in Sax’s poems derive from his sonic mastery ... Such wordsmithing is where Sax is at his best, providing gratification against the relentless obliteration and displeasure that haunts these poems.
Sam Sax’s bury it completes the contemporary trinity of confessional poetry...the speaker in Sax’s collection opens his wounds afresh and offers them to the reader for examination, laying bare the disappointments and pain within the Jewish diaspora and contemporary society at large. The epigraph from James Fenton on the role of epitaphs sets a strong tone for the collection — Sax’s poems are blunt and painful enough to serve as a eulogy but soothing and pleading enough to function as a diary that the reader was invited to glimpse ... bury it, is a collection that gives its reader endless reasons for admiration. From individual lines that one can collect and admire like small gems, to whole poems that are worth framing and imprinting in the memory, Sax is wickedly clever with his use of language and imagery.
