sam sax's bury it, winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, begins with poems written in response to the spate of highly publicized young gay suicides in the summer of 2010. What follows are raw and expertly crafted meditations on death, rituals of passage, translation, desire, diaspora, and personhood. What's at stake is survival itself and the archiving of a lived and lyric history. Laughlin Award judge Tyehimba Jess says "bury it is l...

I can't make heads or tails of it, the goat on the corner of Union and Metropolitan. It is 2016. Ezra is a queer, Jewish person carrying out their last act of protest outside Trump Tower, New York. While they experience their final moments, their life flashes across time and geography, leaping from memories of childhood to the inherited memory and historical movements of their family: smoking Winstons aged twelve, after Hebrew School; their mother disappearing without a trace; a college re...

An “astounding” (Terrance Hayes) debut collection of poems – Winner of the National Poetry Series CompetitionIn this powerful debut collection, sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet’s personal and family histories as mental health patients a...

Winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American PoetsSam Sax's bury it, winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, begins with poems written in response to the spate of highly publicized young gay suicides in the summer of 2010. What follows are raw and expertly crafted meditations on death, rituals of passage, translation, desire, diaspora, and personhood. What's at stake is survival itself and the arc...

Winner of the 2025 IPPY Award for literary fiction. Longlisted for the National Book Award. Named a top debut novel of 2024 by Kirkus, and a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year finalist.In between the space of time when Ezra lights themself on fire and when Ezra dies the world of this book flashes before their eyes. Everyone Ezra's ever loved, every place they've felt queer and at home, or queer and out of place, reveals itself in an instant. Unfoldin...

From the brilliantly talented National Poetry Series and James Laughlin Award winner comes a third collection of poems that uses the humble pig as a lens to explore the body, faith, desire, and power.This imaginative and singular poetry collection interrogates the broadest ideas surrounding the humble pig—farm animal, men/masculinity, police and state violence, desire, queerness, global food systems, religion/Judaism and law—to reimagine various chaotic histories o...

"Forgive my bluntness, but...Goddamn, Sam Sax can write some poems. Devastating, comic, inventive, weird, dangerous, smart as hell. I could talk about the diction sometimes glass and sometimes bouquet. Or the syntax jagged here, balletic there. Or the metaphors, good lord. But the bottom line is that when reading the poems in A GUIDE TO UNDRESSING YOUR MONSTERS, one after the next, I kept saying to myself, probably twisting my face a little bit or squirming in my seat, "Goddamn, Sam Sax ca...

The Winter 2016-17 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles; the Winter issue is staff-edited.This staff edited issue of Ploughshares features a vibrant collection of essays, poems, and short stories. Whether it’s through poetry like Daniel Lawless’s poem “The Old Masters,” or short stories like Kat...

From the brilliantly talented National Poetry Series and James Laughlin Award winner comes a third collection of poems that uses the humble pig as a lens to explore the body, faith, desire, and power.This imaginative and singular poetry collection interrogates the broadest ideas surrounding the humble pig—farm animal, men/masculinity, police and state violence, desire, queerness, global food systems, religion/Judaism and law—to reimagine various chaotic histories o...

Trillium Book Award–winning poet Adam Sol’s newest collection is made up of poems that are loosely linked to the traditional Jewish morning prayers, the Birkhot haShachar, which try to find moments of blessing in the midst of personal and public pain, shame, and worryHow do we respond to others’ pain, both the pain of those we love and the larger global pain of those we don’t know? In a religious context, a witness can offer blessing when those in the midst of suff...

"These poems are so generous, so bright and sharp, so funny and winning, they feel immense."—Paul Guest"Erika Meitner is the new voice of intelligent and emotional poems. Good for poetry. Good for poetry lovers. Good for the rest of us, too."— Nikki GiovanniExploring themes of pregnancy, motherhood, ancestry, and life in the borderline slums of Washington, DC, the richly felt and adroit poetry of Erika Meitner's Ideal Cities moves, mesmerizes, and del...

"As always with a Bob Hicok book, fascinating and a book you sort of can’t help but pick up and suddenly, two hours later, find yourself having read straight through. I can think of just about no contemporary poets who publish such consistently great work."—Corduroy Books