the more i learn, the more i learni don’t know what the fucki’m talking about. someonewho doesn’t care a fig for poetrymight think i knew a lotyet in most bookshops i’m lost,shelves heavy with the bodiesof forgotten writers. it’s relative.a president can say audacity ora president can say sad & both eatthe slow-cured meat of empire.when i say i carry my peopleinside me i don’t mean a country.the star that hangs from my neckis simply a way of saying israelis not a physical place but can bewritten down & carried anywhere.it says my people are most beautifulwhen moving, when movement,when our only state is the liquidstate of water, is adapting to our container.homeland sometimes just meanswhat books you’ve read, what storiesyou spread with your sneakers.my people, any place you livelong enough to build bombsis a place you’ve lived too long—it’s relative. my friends, the onlything i know for sure is the missileson television are only beautifulif you’ve never known suffering.my friends, the only country i willever pledge my allegiance tois your music, is under investigationfor treason.
Everyone’s An Expert At Something
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- January 9, 2024
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Excerpted from PIG by Sam Sax. Copyright © 2023 by Sam Sax. Reprinted with Permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
"In wry poems that encompass everything from Dante to drag shows, this book emphasizes the affinities between humans and other animals.”
—New York Times Book Review
"Vivid, sensuous, and gorgeous."
—Publisher's Weekly
"In this deeply lyrical and experimental tour de force, Sax smashes and inspects every interchangeable lens of the pig, literal and figurative, to unflinchingly examine sexuality, grief, xenotransplantation, and the nature of language itself. Biblical and humorous, provocative and tragic, these poems evoke an absolute and necessary understanding of the very boundaries of our humanity."
—Richard Blanco, author of How to Love a Country
"There are few things I love more in writing than the absolute pleasure(s) of multiple considerations -- a writer who holds an object in their hand and turns it over, tenderly, affording an audience a look at their obsession from several angles. Sam Sax takes this to heights that only he is capable of in Pig, dissecting shape, sound, multiple etymologies, histories. These are poems as rich in playfulness as they are in heartbreak. But they shine in their relentless curiosity. grief is an animal is beautiful all on its own, but it is the questioning that follows -- what kind of animal? let's cut to the chase, after all."
— Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America
"In Pig, Sam Sax charts a complicated and haunting portrayal of body, home, desire, nation, and beast. Sax is able to weave humor throughout their invention, creating new lyrical and visual terrain for language, for connection, for feeling, and for possibility. This book invites you in and then winds through the labyrinths of the mind, body, and history. Sax's words open and open, creating a space of examination of pig in so many forms. As soon as I started reading the book I could not stop; these are poems that I could build a home in."
—Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us: Poems
“For Jews, pork is terefah, forbidden food—and, in this book, with a surprisingly light touch, Sam Sax makes of the pig a powerful, all purpose symbol...Language is the salve for, or the weapon against, a disordered world.”
—NPR
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