Pig
Sam Sax
Scribner Poetry, 2023
978-1-6680-1999-3
Full disclosure: Sam Sax visited a poetry group that met in my apartment before the pandemic struck. We are friendly, he is a mensch, but we are not close friends enough to bar me from reviewing him herewith.
Full disclosure: his latest book is overwhelming, a glutfest. Imagine walking into a restaurant and ordering off an eighty-plus-page menu that only serves some concoction of pork for every course offered (including dessert!).
Full disclosure: it was Randall Jarrell who said: “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he [sic] is great.” I had misremembered this quote as saying “a good book of poems has five or six lightning-struck poems, a dozen or more makes it great.” I decided to review this book when I found myself dog-earing (or is it pig-earing?) far more than a dozen poems:
BABE THE PIG DOES THE SHEEP-NOISE WHEN MOURNING ITS SHEEP MOTHER
QUARANTINE À DEUX
ANTI-ZIONIST ABECEDARIAN
H1N1
EVERYONE’S AN EXPERT AT SOMETHING
I HAVE AFFIXED TO ME THE DIRT OF COUNTLESS AGES. WHO AM I TO DISTURB HISTORY?
IT’S A LITTLE ANXIOUS TO BE A VERY SMALL ANIMAL
HEADLINES
HOG LAGOON
SQUEAL LIKE A PIG
ETYMOLOGY
LEX TALIONIS
POEM WRITTEN INSIDE A LEATHER PIG MASK
JAMES DEAN WITH PIG
THE COCK
STREET FAIR
XENOTRANSPLANTATION
MISS PIGGY
ODE TO THE BELT
IT’S A LITTLE ANXIOUS TO BE A VERY SMALL ANIMAL ENTIRELY SURROUNDED BY WATER
Full Disclosure: Any presidential candidate who would choose one of the poems listed above to be read at their Inauguration in January has my vote. (With extra points for donning a leather pig mask while chosen poem is being performed.)
Full Disclosure: No Hormel Pork Hocks were appropriated or maligned in the writing of Sam Sax’s book (or this review!).
Full Disclosure: This book has not been banned (yet!) by the Utah State Legislature (unlike Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey!).
Full Disclosure: “Last year on Nov 1, Joshua Gutterman Tranen revealed that the Poetry Foundation had indefinitely shelved his review of Sam Sax’s PIG. They did not want to be perceived as “taking sides” by publishing the work of an anti-Zionist Jewish critic writing on an anti-Zionist Jewish poet. This was relayed on Oct. 8, right on the cusp of Israel’s escalated bombardment of Gaza. What is the function of criticism, if not to situate art in its broader context? And what context could be more pertinent for this work than the moment when anti-Zionist Jewish activists in the U.S. find themselves being arrested for opposing the genocide of Palestinians?” (Summer Farah, Genocide in Gaza Blog, December 13, 2023)
Now that I have gotten these disclosures out of the way . . .
I must say that we are living in a moment our pleasures (even readerly ones!) are being heavily policed by both sides of the aisle with their endless jeremiads and shrill invectives. In academic institutions, de-tenure and demotion are now de riguer not to mention outright firings for saying (or writing!) the wrong things at the wrong times, threats of Title VI violations trumping free speech.
If you want a safe space to park your pork in, being careful not to stray into someone else’s comfort zone (i.e. abattoir), then this is probably not your book. This is not to say that Sam Sax is recklessly feckless or depraved. Skip the blurbs. Fasten your seatbelts. Bring on the cameos by Pigpen, Ms. Piggy, and James Dean! Get ready to get your porcine jollies on!
You could start anywhere in this book, but the native Californian in me was particularly tickled by this piggish outing:
“at folsom i watch one man bind another // in blue saran // the sub positioned in the shape of a shamed christ // his hole exposed to the sun as crows circle // his back bruised gray as a grandfather’s cadillac // the dom orbits in a black latex mask // this ritual as old as the day is // as these two on the dais rosed in prayer”
In a poem where a porky christ is sandwiched between sub and dom, we marvel at the diurnal figuration that a hole cum circle cum orbit can make. We notice the strange parade of colors from blue to gray (love that Grandaddy Cadillac simile!) to black to rose, reminding us of the alchemical transformations language can induce from day to dais. Throughout Sax’s opus, the wordplay gets very intense (as Ashbery would say):
“you can’t spell basement without semen. / or i suppose you could but then it’d just read bat.”
More than a mere anagram, we are reminded of the abasement one might feel in the cum-stained backroom of the East Village’s most notorious leather bar, “The Cock.” In his poem “Etymology,” Sax traces the sources of the root word “gun” from the Dutch to the French to the Greek to the Old English to the German to the Old Country to the New Country (as if languages were lovers, tricks, one-night stands), culminating with the Old Norse:
“the etymology of gun is tied to horses from the old norse // a woman’s proper name made of two words for battle // i held a gun only once, my lover begged me to press it // against the back of his head as we fucked, his pistol fit so easy // in my hand when i pulled the trigger, the sound it made swallowed me // click. . . .”
Some may want to fact check Sax’s etymologies while others may want to go along for the cruisy ride. Chekhov’s gun indeed goes off in the final act of this poem. What surprised me was the oral reversal of the speaker being swallowed by the sound his climax (feeble? merciful?) made: a Yeatsian “audible click.” Readers are invited to make what they will of the more and more elongated spaces between periods that conclude the poem. Russian roulette, anyone?
Of course, these jujitsu moves are not what stirred up all the Cancel/Boycott Hoopla, no no!, not when a poem like “Anti-Zionist Abecedarian” is lurking around the corner:
after you finish
building your missiles & after your borders
collapse under the weight of their own split
databases
every worm in this
fertile & cursed
ground will be its own country. for us
home never was a place in dirt or even
inside the skin but
just exists in language. let me explain. my people
I love the progression of pronouns in the opening cascade of this nimble form: you/your/their/its/us and landing on “me.” The poem then expands on this first-person point of view:
once a man welcomed me home as i entered the old city, so i
pulled out a book of poems to show him my papers—my
queer city of paper—my people’s ink
running through my blood.
settlers believe land can be possessed
they carved their names into firearms &
use this to impersonate the dead—we are
visitors here on earth.
Sax reminds us where his citizenship resides: in the land of Poesy where his “book of poems” are his “papers.” It is not land he is after to possess but language. To be queer is to to be dispossessed, the poem itself an act of reclamation and loyalty to something Netanyahu (and Putin!) might know next to nothing about. In “Everyone’s an Expert at Something,” even Barak Obama is not let off the tenterhook:
“a president can say audacity / a president can say sad & both eat / the slow-cured meat of empire. / when I say i carry my people / inside me i don’t mean a country. / the star that hangs from my neck / is simply a way of saying israel / is not a physical place but can be / written down & carried anywhere.”
Have I ever seen a lower-case i paired with a lower-case israel in a poem before? Lest we forget our poet is willing to unabashedly put a pistol in the back of his lover’s head and pull the proverbial trigger, now we are reminded he can equally sue for peace:
“my people, any place you live / long enough to build bombs / is a place you’ve lived too long—”
Notice Sax’s expert use of enjambments in the lines above. In the Land of Poesy, one must not only master the words themselves but the many silences as well.
