(sax, sam) sam sax is a queer Jewish writer and educator. He has received many prestigious fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is the winner of the 2016 Iowa Review Award, and his poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other journals. In his powerful debut collection, Madness (Penguin), selected for the National Poetry Series by Terrance Hayes, 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.
