Yr Dead by Sam Sax
Yr Dead is a lyrical, dizzying portrait of the final moments of a man's life, and the moments – both personal and intergenerational – that have taken him to this point
From the opening of Yr Dead, you know that Ezra dies at its end, engulfed in flames in a final act of protest after the 2016 election. With each page turn, Sax’s words propel you towards this inevitability.
In his final moments, Ezra remembers his 27 years of life in fragments. His mother’s abandonment; a teenage romance with a boy, now dead; his college years marred by violent domestic abuse; his father’s late uptake of Orthodoxy and holy water salesmanship; his twenties spent in an often-medical haze. Not just his life, but his ancestry; centuries of Jewish-American diaspora before his family tree collapses into the singularity of his death.
These memories come in a dizzying achronology, varying in voice and experimenting with form, and Sax is unmistakably and relentlessly a poet throughout; “When at last I die, my xylem floods with all these stories at once and I’m so full I break into scripture”.
To have spent years writing about self-immolation, only for the book to be released the year that such acts make headlines, perhaps burdens Yr Dead with the onus of providing answers. Of course, this is an impossible task. But, while Ezra’s road to suicide is not exclusively political, Sax skillfully captures the affect of a culture in crisis, where the overwhelming urgency to act meets structurally-enforced powerlessness to produce a spectacle of human desperation.