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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

the book Love Opens the Valley of Emptiness is in six books. book one dan is introducing free to the public, in four parts. here is part two, part one was released last week and is about 5 pagers below part two. dan will be releasing a book about every 10 days. each part of book one, here, consist of eleven poems each. 44 poems in all contained in book one.books 2-6 each will contain over 3500 words of poetry all by dan ferguson as well. dan has been writing sense his early teens. h...

How do we reckon our past without being ravaged by it? How do we use people, and their bodies, to express ourselves?

The author of the bestseller The Disappearing Spoon reveals the secret inner workings of the brain through strange but true stories.Early studies of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike -- strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, horrendous accidents -- and see how victims coped. In many cases their survival was miraculous, if puzzling. Observers were amazed by the transformations that took place when different parts of the br...