Yr Dead

Starred review from June 15, 2024
In the first work of fiction from a poet who illuminates the queer and Jewish experiences, life flashes before the eyes of a nonbinary person who's lit themself on fire. It's not a spoiler to say that poet Sax's debut novel centers on an act of self-immolation. The novel begins with short descriptions of three smaller encounters with fire, three different burns, labeled first through third degree: a painful childhood accident at the stove, adolescent smoking, a ritual gone horribly wrong. The final section, which comprises the bulk of the novel, is the final degree of burn: immolation. In vignettes that transmute experience in associative fits and starts, as one might cycle through visions at the end of one's life, the narrator, Ezra, reflects on the world they inhabit as a queer Jewish person: a world that shifts mainly between Yiddishland and a gritty, sometimes ugly, but enchanting New York City. The fragments bounce back and forth in time, as Ezra inhabits the lives of their ancestors in the old country, the moment of their conception, their ambulance trip after their final act, and everywhere in between. Ezra's musings span not just time and space but a range of topics--from Jewish ancestral legacies to technology and the internet to gender identity to parent-child relationships--and draw upon a deep well of references. The novel is replete with vivid images, the strength of which is rare outside of poetry. Sax has produced a work that is meditative, deeply humane, and profoundly original. Less plot-driven than language-, emotion-, and image-driven--a poet's novel through and through--the result is a searingly beautiful and devastating foray into fiction. A poetic depiction of pain, queerness, Jewishness, and what it is to live.

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February 25, 2025
There are no illusions to poet Sax's fiction debut. The first-person narrative dies of self-immolation described in poetic verse within the first pages. What follows is a cacophony of paragraphs intimate in detail about the experiences and thoughts of Ezra, who is queer, nonbinary, and Jewish. The vivid descriptions read like journal entries recounting religious youth trips, ill-fated relationships, traumatic abuse, lustful longing, and everyday text conversations with close friends. There is a brash honesty in the nonlinear recollections the narrator gathers in this exciting new work, as well as layered retrospection that is at once tragic and illuminating. The young Ezra copes with a world that does not accept them morally and revels in the self-inflicted damage that will lead to the self-annihilation he has planned. Sax's depiction of this grim thought process is both alarming and rewarding.

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