Pig
Poems
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
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 of the body, faith, ecology, desire, hygiene, and power.
Sam Sax draws on autobiography and history to create poems that explore topics ranging from drag queens and Miss Piggy to pig farming and hog lagoons. Collectively, these poems, borne of Sax’s obsession, offer a varied picture of what it means to be a human being. Delivered in a variety of forms, infused with humor, grace, sadness, and anger, Pig is a wholly unique collection from a virtuosic and original poet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this vivid, sensuous, and gorgeous third collection, Sax (bury it) considers the extended and various metaphors of the pig in all its forms. By using the pig as both subject and object, Sax navigates queerness, filth, beauty, and capitalism, exploring at all times "the animal yearning/ within the animal within the animal." Sax situates the pig long before an age of wealth, greed, and violence: "pig existed before we had tongues/ to name it." In doing so, they remind the reader that "it's a miracle life existed here at all." These poems celebrate all things that seek to subvert dominant structures, drawing attention to the beauty of messy, complicated states and advising that "there are so many words for you children &/ none of them are dirty" and to "be disgusted into beauty." With tenderness, a critical eye, and a longing borne from the feeling that "i've never been lonelier than i am/ right now," Sax turns their rumination on the pig into a consideration of everything. Finding beauty in the lowest, filthiest things, these poems guide the audience's gaze toward redemption.
