Water as Identity: On Sam Sax’s ‘Bury It’
Sax’s poems are blunt and painful enough to serve as a eulogy but soothing and pleading enough to function as a diary.
Sam Sax
Poetry | 88 Pages | 6” x 9” | Reviewed: Ebook
978–0–8195–7731–3 | First Edition | $14.95
Wesleyan University Press | Middletown, Connecticut | BUY HERE
Sam Sax’s Bury It completes the contemporary trinity of confessional poetry, accompanying Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead in continuing the discussion about identity and suffering. 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 highly personal and intimate collection, beginning with a poem about young gay suicides in 2010 to illustrate how society has failed youth and the LGBT+ community. What follows this arresting opening is poem after poem that punch the reader in the gut with emotional force and craft. “Pentimento” was one of my numerous favorites for this very reason, a poem that begins mid-run and doesn’t stop even after the last line has been read. In it, Sax weaves a discourse that is a “painting of paintings,” the layers of which continue mounting until the sense of overwhelming urgency and conflict is transferred to the reader from the speaker, who states:
if only I knew the history
of art I could give you
more than the color
of the thing […]
i could use
expensive words to make
these bizarre gestures
tenable[.]
It is impossible not to stop and marvel at individual lines or passages in Bury It. Sax reexamines the limits of language, pushing to new heights with his imagery and unsettlingly honest wording. I treasured Sax’s voice for its courageous and sharp tone, which is a comfort for those who need it and a wake-up call for those who have not taken the time to listen previously. One does not need to relate to everything in Bury It for the poems to make a reader tremble, as I did when the speaker in “Kaddish” tells of how
the first boy [he] took in [his] mouth
had the lord in him / just [his] luck /
always a half step from salvation[.]
Sax rejects the romanticization of suffering and suicide, topics that receive the respect and attention they deserve in his poems. While the first-person speaker gives the collection a personal tone, there is also a sense of universality to Sax’s poems, a collective sort of bravery that comes from standing up not just for yourself but for those who cannot do so themselves. Filled with the vulnerability and strength of a survivor, Bury It creates a warm tightness in the throat. The poems feel like a microcosm, an experiment, for what society should strive toward, at a time when
pilgrims from all over
throw themselves into the bay’s black eyes
add their names to that dark ledger.
Suicide and death form the backbone of the collection by inviting the reader to engage in a dialogue, to move away from the dismissive tendencies depicted in the poems. Sax demonstrates what sort of language and topics people need to open themselves up to, whether by being speakers or listeners, stressing that both roles are equally important in dispelling prejudices and creating a healing atmosphere.
The pace of the collection slows down toward the middle, yet the poems become no less impressive or powerful than the earlier ones. At this point, Sax focuses on unraveling the speaker’s personal narratives while giving the reader ample opportunities to gorge on the luscious writing. It is in this second half that one will find poems like “Impossible Drama” and “Objectophile,” which explore the other big themes in the collection: sexuality and gender roles.
Water plays an important role in this regard and was one of my favorite features of the collection. It was both meditative and jolting to note the ways in which Sax carried the image of water through the poems, either by mentioning it directly or by making the writing mimic its quality. Bury It was the first collection that, in my opinion, did justice not only to all the qualities of water but also to all the possibilities it offers, as noted by the speaker of “Hydrophobia” when he tells the reader:
let me tell you about water
it feeds you as it feeds
without it you die
without you it’s fine[.]
There is so much more that can be said about Bury It, 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. I felt like I were sitting on a stool facing the speaker, listening to his narrative and watching each poem unfold like a scene with its own self-contained tension and conflict that almost never had a resolution, the collection cycling through them one after the other as if a jukebox. Bury It is a collection that I firmly believe is impossible not to feel empathy for during and after reading,
to wonder what happens if instead I read his story backwards […] if it ends how all stories end — an infant climbing into its mother, animals throwing themselves back in the ocean.
(from “Impermanence”).
