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    A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters
    A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters
    A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters
    Ebook55 pages30 minutes

    A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters

    By Sam Sax

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    About this ebook

    "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
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherButton Poetry
    Release dateMar 1, 2020
    ISBN9781943735082
    A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters
    Author

    Sam Sax

    Sam Sax is a queer, jewish, writer and educator. They are the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and Bury It, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They’re the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Granta and elsewhere. Sam has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, and is currently serving as a Lecturer in the ITALIC program at Stanford University. Their first novel Yr Dead will be published by McSweeney’s in 2024.

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      Book preview

      A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters - Sam Sax

      BESTIARY

      medusa—

      when i saw my face / reduced & reddened / in his eyes

      i turned / to stone / or a pillar of salt watching my village burn

      he was the village / burning / maybe that’s a different story

      maybe in the end / only the snakes wept

      mermaid—

      half fish / half faggot / wishing for legs or the ocean / to open

      like a mouth & swallow / all the fallen soldiers & seamen

      i saved / a man / from his ship / fire in the water / brought him

      to land / when i got my legs / he split me open anyway

      said i was salt & slick / said my stink stank fresh

      werewolf—

      there are many words for transformation / metamorphosis

      metaphor / medication / go to sleep / beside the man you love

      & wake up next to a dog / maybe the moon brought it out of him

      hound hungry for blood / maybe it’s your fault / or maybe

      it was there inside him / howling all along

      RIBS

      at the rib joint

      we became men.

      his whole body

      smoked for ten hours

      came apart

      in my hands.

      sucked the meat

      off him. sucked

      the bone. marrow

      becomes you,

      you know?

      you know, when you eat

      something, it becomes you?

      younger me grew broccoli crowns from our skull,

      grew hand antlers, ground ankle beef.

      at the table

      god unhinged his ribs

      at the joint. opened him

      like an oven laughing

      with smoke, steam

      flapping its black wings

      up from his organs.

      when i ate his ribs

      i became a man

      or maybe just ribs

      braided together

      at the table

      or maybe a creation myth,

      when i ate him.

      in the beginning there was a table

      i sat & ate at until i was something.

      my reflection swallowed in the plate,

      my god, the weight of the blade.

      the blade, singing.

      you know when you become

      something it eats you? the teeth

      in my hand. the weight of the

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