Madness
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An “astounding” (Terrance Hayes) debut collection of poems – Winner of the National Poetry Series Competition
In 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 and practitioners. Ultimately, Madness attempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts; these poems trouble the static categories of sanity, heterosexuality, masculinity, normality, and health. sax’s innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"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.
