The Brooklyn Rail

Death is at the center of Sam Sax’s Yr Dead. The poet’s debut novel is, after all, a nearly 300-page meditation on the very process of dying. Sax has never been one to shy away from ambition in their poetry, often tackling imposing subjects through lyricism and extended metaphor. (Their most recent collection, Pig [2023], explored faith, state power, sexuality, and more through the lens of the “pig.”) Sax’s poetic style is certainly present throughout Yr Dead, weaving between forms and often relying on figurative language. But this fiction is an escalation of Sax’s poetic ambition, with the story this time around grounding itself in a particularly jarring narrative: the unraveling of our narrator’s self-immolation.

With each turn of the page, the flame does its work and devours our narrator, Ezra. As the scorching advances, over the course of the novel in its entirety, we are plunged into that familiar yet discomforting cliché of a life flashing before one’s eyes—in Yr Dead’s case, it’s Ezra’s life that we witness. The reader’s discomfort throughout the book is unavoidable. It’s startling to be reminded, each time you feel yourself falling further into that life, that it all ends with combustion. However, despite the cynicism at its core, the real heart of Sax’s first novel is a question, surprisingly teeming with light—a divine kind, I suppose, caught at the end of a dark tunnel. In Yr Dead, Sax asks: how do we survive?

Sax, and Ezra, are preoccupied with the idea of survival throughout Yr Dead—going back through family folktales to unearth centuries and centuries of fable; tracing lineage through Russia, Poland, Yemen, back all the way to that most cherished lore of a wandering people; still surviving, following their original exodus. Ezra searches through this history, not through remembrance or stories passed down, but through near-death immersion, looking for something that connects us all—looking for something to give them a parting hope, despite the match already having been lit. The question isn’t how can Ezra be saved. Their end is always only a few pages away—but rather, Ezra searches for a final answer to how we all might survive the flame’s encroachment.

It’s no accident that Ezra’s self-immolation occurs in the middle of a march—the kind of cycling, wandering protest that we’ve grown accustomed to in these recent years. The demonstration is described as occurring outside of one of “the President’s towers,” though it otherwise remains unnamed and aimless. While Yr Dead reads most immediately as an existential treatise on family, ancestry, and legacy, it is also deeply concerned with the politics of today; or rather, the performance of our politics today, and what it says about our misconnection. As Ezra burns, we parse through their pulsing observations of Instagram dispatches collecting likes for particularly clever slogans markered onto poster-boards. And there is a clairvoyant foresight that Ezra is able to practice, for a moment lunging ahead to face the online commentary regarding their fatalist demonstration. All of this, and still we understand very little of what has led these people to rally. This is where Ezra’s despair at the center of Yr Dead’s premise is most evident:

How is it possible to pack a city street with people, all armed with language of “justice” and “freedom,” and yet have it all reduced down to something cheap and commonplace? Something with little agreed-upon meaning? A convening, but no real tilt toward community? How can we be free—how can we fight for breath—if we remain content without truly seeing one another?

—because that’s just it, that’s how we survive. Community can be our salvation—so long as community is practiced as an action. Sax’s argument is there the whole way through, becoming clearer with each new page as Ezra languishes away, peering through the fire and searching back through all those that they’ve loved or known.

So I owe them my life, these people. What’s left of my life, I owe them.

It’s the things that we do for one another when we remain committed to each other in earnesty, that will save us—these little rituals, these burning vows.

Community can be found in what goes on in a single-use bathroom at a gay bar. It can be found in an empty lot bonfire in a college town—in any college town. Community can be found on a Tumblr messaging forum, chatting with strangers; and it can be found in the joining together of young sweethearts through wordless exhales. It’s in these small unions, in the exchange of true recognition, that we are able to find what we need to continue on and to continue fighting.

In their remembering, Ezra recognizes themself in the mouth of their college boyfriend, tumbling over and free-falling down his throat, sinking deeper within themself. They recognize themself in their parents’ new adulthood, inhabiting their father and their mother at once, willing their own creation. And they recognize themself in all of the old villages, some still here and some burnt to memory long ago, that channeled countless ancestors towards a climactic converging point, there on an American city sidewalk—Ezra’s effigy, an inheritance.

Sax’s achievement with Yr Dead is the hope that it beckons forward, even within such ruin. It’s an assertion that we are light when we are offering something to one another, absent performance. Yr Dead is a closing prayer—an argument for running into the light at full sprint.