INTERVIEW: sam sax (Yr Dead)
Yr Dead
sam sax
McSweeney’s
Interview by Spencer Tierney
At the book launch for Yr Dead (McSweeney’s, 2024) at a Berkeley bar in late August, sam sax began by reading two new poems. They told the crowd that it felt right to start that way. Later, when sax read from Yr Dead, they had folks make a one-clap gesture between fragments, akin to finger snaps from a receptive audience at a poetry reading.
Yr Dead is a novel with a poetic heartbeat in the storytelling. Language pulses. There’s the non-binary queer protagonist Ezra’s death, which begins the novel, followed by scenes from their life and their ancestors’ lives. There are text messages, ancestral myths, memories, meditations. The book consists of a collection of one- to two-page fragments, which are typically nonlinear. Despite heavy subject matter, though, the book has a lightness to it. Like warm sunlight on skin under a sky of scattered storm clouds.
I read this book first without taking notes, just enjoying it. On rereading, though, I was drawn to explore how recurring images travel across fragments as a secondary layer to experience. The poetic scaffoldings, maybe.
On a stormy day in November, I interviewed sax over Zoom. Many questions came down to different versions of “How did you do this?” A novel that’s fragmentary yet full of momentum. Full of images yet never cluttered. And sam, generously, shed some light.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Spencer Tierney: If I were to describe this book to someone, maybe an oversimplified way would be to say it’s about a queer person lighting themself on fire. But how did you make a book about a person’s death feel so alive – and life-affirming?
sam sax: I feel like over the past seven years of making the book, I still haven’t figured out how to talk about it because each context requires a different description. Whether it’s about alienation and protest or about Jewishness, belonging, and diaspora or if it’s about queerness or political violence. That feels like a good description, though: It’s about a queer person who lights themself on fire. And then the book unfolds in these nonlinear lyric fragments.
Thanks for saying it feels life-affirming. I was thinking about The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula Le Guin, particularly in thinking of the book as a vessel for carrying the story of a life. Maybe that’s a piece of it. In a more traditional trajectory, the book would culminate in the protagonist’s death. We know we’re going there and that’s the climatic moment. I was kinda curious if that culminating incident, in fact, opens the book. What becomes possible? When I started doing that, the book opened up in more interesting, complex, and multi-textured ways.
ST: I love that. How did you arrive at the title, “Yr Dead?”
ss: I’ve been waiting to talk to someone about the title of this book. It hasn’t come up. I mean, the book title was so many things before “Yr Dead.” It was “Applause Yr Dead,” “Applaud Yr Dead.” It moved through multiple iterations of how to spell “your.” The thing I wanted to hold onto was both the text language and the confusion: The “you are” – you, the speaker, are dead – and the possessive “your.” How do you constitute your people, your dead? Who are your people? Ezra, as the protagonist, is constantly searching for belonging, meaning, and answers to those questions.
ST: For being a book that deals with suicide, you took extreme care in thinking about the audience. How did you arrive at the approaches to both the beautiful content warning and in describing the act of suicide sparsely?
ss: The content warning was a pretty late addition. I was thinking about what for me as a reader I’d appreciate. Work that deals with suicidality is charged and complicated, so I didn’t want a presumptuous note, but a note of care. And it follows a dedication: “For everyone who’s kept me alive.” That felt like a close identification of the author’s experience with suicidal ideation too.
Through seven years of working on this text, perhaps the more exploitative images I culled because their power wasn’t driving the book forward. I didn’t want to sit inside the brutality of the act. The things I was interested in exploring were all these other things in Ezra’s life, not what drove them to this act. And how, in looking at all the narrative fragments, we don’t have an answer. Normatively, in how we’re taught to read, we’re looking at traditional linearity in narrative. We’re looking for causation. The book tries to resist those impulses. The truth of why anyone does anything is so complex and multiple.
ST: This book is a collection of these fragments that somehow create momentum. Yet they also hold their own, whether a story, experience, or reflection. How did you know when each fragment felt complete in its own right?
ss: I largely overwrote this book and then pulled it back by a lot. This is probably a quarter or fifth of an earlier draft that over the years I pulled and restructured and returned bits to. Part of the answer is through that pulling and restructuring. Seeing how fragments were in conversation with each other. And then writing into the absences between them or where it felt like adding some element from Ezra’s life would be useful.
Maybe this has more to do with my writing life being trained in poems and needing the serotonin kick of finishing something. I built in this structure where I could make a paragraph that is then a page of this book. To have that momentum of accomplishment. This was the formal structure that allowed me to make a larger prose project. And there are a lot of fun ways to end a fragment or vignette.
ST: The scale of time varies a lot from ancestral time, myths, flashbacks and present-tense story. Yet every section started with italicized ancestral myths. Did you group fragments based on patterns in the time scales or in other ways?
ss: One structuring device was deeply intuitive. Reorganizing sections again and again to see how momentum operates. There are some more traditional narrative elements buried in how the fragments are laid out. One section more in chronological time is this middle trauma narrative where Ezra is in an abusive relationship. How we tend to talk about trauma and memory is fracturous. So having one of the central traumatic inciting incidents be one of the few things laid out in linear time felt important to me.
But part of the aesthetic or political project is a critique of linear time. That it’s just not true. It’s quite an American or Western ideological construction that the past is this gone thing that may inform the present rather than being something that animates everything we do.
The deep ancestral familial worlds were going to be a third of the book. As I narrowed it down, though, those sections started to feel like Ezra could be traveling back through a blood memory, actually embodying their ancestral family members, or narratives Ezra heard. Those things being equally possible, that slipperiness, felt powerful.
ST: Metaphor is usually a one-to-one relationship between two things, but in this book, recurring images seem to evolve over time. My favorite being the octopus. There’s an octopus in a video Ezra watches with his high school boyfriend, then Ezra gets an octopus tattoo, and during their first protest, Ezra wears a gold octopus brooch. Are there types of stories told through images?
ss: Thanks for naming that. There are a lot of ways the book is structured like that, where you’ll get these fragments or images that are not necessarily explained but opened up later in the book. Or you get a different narrative undertone later. These evolutions of images, the clarifying and estranging of them, happen throughout Ezra’s experience.
ST: We get humor in Yr Dead especially in the text messages between Ezra and their best friend Ericka. And I’m reminded of your poem, “For My Niblings In Anticipation of Their Birth,” because there’s a similarly irreverent humor. How do you see humor’s role in your poetry and Yr Dead?
ss: Both projects play with transgression and humor and Jewishness, that poem and this book. As well as any piece of writing that’s meant to hold the heavens and the catacombs of experience. The complex multi-dimensionalness of our lives. Humor opens a door for a reader to get closer to the text, especially more complex and difficult material. If it’s just a slog, that only hits one note, you know?
There’s also a very Jewish way of thinking about trauma and humor. How do you contend with historical and lived trauma? Humor’s not just a defense mechanism; it’s a way of navigating the most difficult things in the world and in our lives. Humor also makes it more fun to write.
ST: Has your relationship with this book changed since being longlisted for the National Book Award, and also the 2024 presidential election?
ss: Yeah, for sure. The National Book Award put my book in a different kind of conversation than it was in beforehand. There was also some validation from, like, proper novelists. I felt like I was cosplaying as a novelist, and then here comes the fact that this novel has been accepted by people I really admire. It made it seem possible for me to keep writing novels. I was pretty sure before then–I already have one drafted up–but it was nice.
As for the election, I began this book in 2016 around that election. As I worked on it, I watched it slowly become historical fiction. Some of the intensity of emotion felt too keyed up at moments. And my relationship to the narrative changed because of the political context of the world, because of ongoing violence. I don’t know how it feels now because it feels like the election just happened and happened like a thousand years ago. The 2024 one. There’s a way that writing a book bounded in time feels topical while it also has a deep history that goes back to antiquity.
