Review by Booklist Review
In this simmering debut, winner of the National Poetry Series, educator sax investigates medical science and mental illness, language and lust, history and addiction. In Willowbrook and On Syphilis, sax spotlights the systemic torture of vulnerable masses by twentieth-century American institutions. Elsewhere, the poet considers such defunct procedures as bloodletting, trepanation, and lobotomy. His poems are also laced with desire. In On Hysteria, he muses over surgery's strange sexuality (the insertion of instruments / into the body), and in Satyriasis, he confronts his own longings (keep giving lust / an ugly name, i'll keep making it sing). Throughout, variations on an appendix to the 1952 DSM-1 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) serve as a haunting, unraveling refrain, with altered excerpts opening the collection's four sections. What began as Nomenclature, for example, ends as Nature and fittingly, sax titles his concluding poem Erasure. At once clinically precise and brazenly effusive, vulnerable, and extraordinarily daring, sax's poems redefine madness altogether. The poet says it best when he states, All my poems are wild birds. Feral, soaring, and uncommonly beautiful.--Shemroske, Briana Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"You either love the world/ or you live in it," proclaims Sax in a line that works as a refrain emblematic of this vivacious debut. It's a quick-moving, wide-ranging collection, with Sax tackling mental health issues amid family anecdotes, amorous encounters, and evocations of the Holocaust and the AIDS crisis. By opening each of the book's four sections with a litany from the DSM-I (1952) in various stages of erasure, Sax recalls an era in which homosexuality was still classified as a mental disorder. When Sax is at his most inventive, his poems sparkle and haunt, such as when he concocts nightmares for a therapist "to decipher"; he writes, "I'm eating a plate of boiled peanuts-inside each a boy, winged + writhing + red." Sax also excels at formal innovation, with no two poems appearing quite alike in their presentation. However, he often tries to say too much in too short a span, shifting among a dizzying number of subjects and styles; the meanings he tries to convey in a poem can become muddled in their own slyness or unfocused in light of the conceits established by his titles. Perhaps that is part of the point, though: "madness" is a transcendent term that describes not only mental illness but also wild ecstasy. Criticism aside, Sax sketches his own queer lineage with ingenuity and verve. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this beautifully concentrated howl of a book, a startling debut, queer Jewish writer and educator Sax explores mental illness, addiction, and the unshakable grip of sexual desire. He's clearly one to feel things intensely ("life ripping open before me/ led to me being ripped open by life"), and the poems can be relentless, painful reading. But however raw, they're also coolly crafted; readers can admire Sax for the sharply observed sentiment "anything can be a drug if you love it," followed swiftly by "anyone can be a drug if you love him," while also appreciating how effectively those lines echo each other. Sax can be both funny ("thank you// science for teaching me what to fear most") and angry (his poems are "wild birds/ pecking eyeholes in the windows of hotels"), and he's refreshingly frank as he speaks out to us ("spare me the lecture/ on the survival/ of my body/ & i will spare you my body." -VERDICT A terrific first -collection; highly recommended for poetry lovers. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
