Pig: Poems

...now as you eat what your mother eats
her fear is your world torn & thrown to birds.
but still the light is thick in the trees. the callery
pears are loud this season & my throat is bright
with flowers for you both. such beautiful flowers
i hardly have the words.

- for my niblings in anticipation of their birth

Thank you NetGalley and (publisher) for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.


Sam Sax's Pig is an incredibly imaginative and obscure collection of poems and storytelling, most of them rooted in the pig—the pig mask, pig persona, pig hearts, the dead pig, etc. The pig becomes a symbol, a malleable thing, allowing for sax to comment on personal experiences, like queerness, religion, sex, politics. I purposely mention these themes broadly, as sax discusses them each intimately in more ways than one. Even when the pig is not mentioned, the stories in these poems still somehow surround them—with stench, with themes of imitation, with being unwanted, with being wanted in the wrong ways, at the wrong times.

The connection between history and current life, even the future, exists in so many of these poems. Our ancestry is so tightly connected to who we are, and to the shame we carry for being nothing like them. I found these poems of historical events, whether they are personal or universal, to be especially “emotional” (I use air quotes because emotional does not even begin to encapsulate what I mean).

As much as I love the themes, there is no denying sam sax's strength is in form, in playfulness, in experimentation. No two poems ever feel the same. Down to the titles, sam sax brings something unique.

and those FIRST LINES! The bits of dialogue! There are just so many gorgeous, GORGEOUS lines everywhere. Even so, each poem held its own, asked its own questions, forced us to commit to and emotionally care for an entirely new story on each page. I found myself learning about history, about sax's own experiences, about myself. This is one of my favorites from sam sax.