A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters

A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters
Author: Sam Sax
Publisher: Button Poetry
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2017-03-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1943735085

"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 can write some poems." Ross Gay

Nothing Is Okay

Nothing Is Okay
Author: Rachel Wiley
Publisher: Button Poetry
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2018-03-12
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1943735387

Nothing is Okay is the second full-length poetry collection by Rachel Wiley, whose work simultaneously deconstructs the lies that we were taught about our bodies and our beings, and builds new ways of viewing ourselves. As she delves into queerness, feminism, fatness, dating, and race, Wiley molds these topics into a punching critique of culture and a celebration of self. A fat positive activist, Wiley's work soars and challenges the bounds of bodies and hearts, and the ways we carry them.

We Slept Here

We Slept Here
Author: Sierra DeMulder
Publisher: Button Poetry
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2017-01-04
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1943735123

We Slept Here is a case study in vulnerability and honesty. In this sequence of memoir-esque poems, Sierra DeMulder pulls at the threads of a past abusive relationship and the long road to forgiveness. The poems themselves become that which was taken from her. These are hard poems, made up of clarity and healing, which attempt to share some of their peace with the world.

Pig

Pig
Author: Sam Sax
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2023-09-19
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 166801999X

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.

peluda

peluda
Author: Melissa Lozada-Oliva
Publisher: Button Poetry
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2017-09-08
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1943735298

One of the most original performance poets of her generation, Melissa Lozada-Oliva has captivated crowds across the country and online with her vivid narratives. Humorous and biting, personal and communal, self-deprecating and unapologetically self-loving, peluda (meaning “hairy” or “hairy beast”) is the poet at her best. The book explores the relationship between femininity and body hair as well as the intersections of family, class, the immigrant experience, Latina identity, and much more, all through Lozada-Oliva’s unique lens and striking voice. Peluda is a powerful testimony on body image and the triumph over taboo.

Clatter

Clatter
Author: Neil Hilborn
Publisher: Button Poetry
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2017-03-27
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1943735220

Clatter is a chapbook by Neil Hilborn, produced in the aftermath of his severe concussion in a bicycle accident. Written in museums, ex-girlfriends’ kitchens, and Mexico, the chapbook showcases Hilborn’s breadth of style as well as his humor, and represents a unique glimpse into the writer's early work.

Helium

Helium
Author: Rudy Francisco
Publisher: Button Poetry
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2017-10-30
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1943735352

Helium is the debut poetry collection by internet phenom Rudy Francisco, whose work has defined poetry for a generation of new readers. Rudy's poems and quotes have been viewed and shared millions of times as he has traveled the country and the world performing for sell-out crowds. Helium is filled with work that is simultaneously personal and political, blending love poems, self-reflection, and biting cultural critique on class, race and gender into an unforgettable whole. Ultimately, Rudy's work rises above the chaos to offer a fresh and positive perspective of shared humanity and beauty.

bury it

bury it
Author: Sam Sax
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 103
Release: 2018-09-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0819577324

Winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets 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 lit with imagery and purpose that surprises and jolts at every turn. Exuberant, wild, tightly knotted mesmerisms of discovery inhabit each poem in this seethe of hunger and sacred toll of toil. A vitalizing and necessary book of poems that dig hard and lift luminously." In this phenomenal second collection of poems, sam sax invites the reader to join him in his interrogation of the bridges we cross, the bridges we burn, and bridges we must leap from.