In 2026, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Sam Sax discusses their curatorial approach and their own creative work.

Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, editorial director at the Academy, and I’m here today with our June Guest Editor, Sam Sax. Sam, a 2017 James Laughlin Award winner is the author most recently of Pig. Sam, welcome and thank you so much for joining me.

Sam Sax: Hi, so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Poets.org: Sure. Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for June, Pride Month?

Sax: Yay. I was thinking about queers and queer writers who I love who’ve changed my life, who make new things possible in the world through their writing. These are all writers whose poems have lived for a time in my body, and materially and experientially changed in one way or another, my relationship to the world. I was also thinking about Pride Month in its sort of its original form as a riot and a sense of rupture and disruption. It was folks fighting cops in the street, right, and changing the conditions of their lives. It was a moment of refusal that has since been taken to sell beer and banks, and sort of like normalized neoliberalism. And so I think all of the writers here who I’m pulling from are also using their work as a mode of rupture or disruption for me in a similar way, who turn to language to not only offer new cartographies for impossible futures, but to reach a hand out to a reader and remind us what’s important about human touch.

I was thinking about José Esteban Muñoz writing about the queer aesthetic as a blueprint or schemata for forward dawning futurity, and these poems are a way to map new ways of staying alive in the midst of state and interpersonal violence. These are all poets who I love, poets who I wanted to assemble into the same room and throw a little party and see what they have to say to each other.

Poets.org: Now, if you could direct readers to a poem in our collection at Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would that be and why?

Sax: Yeah, this was such a pickle because there are so many poems I love, and so many poems that were sent to me and changed me. But I wanted to maybe think about this one poem that I first found in a book, and I think my friend, Cameron Awkward-Rich, the poet, whispered it to me once on a weird, dark night in Oakland. And there’s this poem by Aaron Smith from his first book called “Boston,” and it’s from his first book, Blue on Blue Ground, and yeah, it’s one of those poems where I remember exactly where and when it was and who read it to me, and how that reading felt. And I think it always feels like a kind of time travel to that former self whenever I return to this poem, which is almost more accurate and specific than a photograph, because there’s a somatic element to it for me.

In this poem, each line offers surprise and surety. It’s like you’re being led by the hand through the poet’s known and strange interior hallways. It’s structured as a diptych modeling in some ways, both the epistolary nature of the poem between the I and the you, and also the impossibility of desire, legibility, and language to both mean and make meaning. Yeah. I think I also ended up taking a line from it as the title of another poem, as I often do with Aaron’s poems, and that’s the line, “I want so desperately to be finished with desire […].”

Poets.org: We’re going to return to that subject of desire a little bit later, but for now, who or what are you reading right now?

Sax: I know I have to come up with new ... Oh, I wrote out the initial Q&A a couple months ago.

Poets.org: It’s OK.

Sax: But I want to shout out Rickey Laurentiis’s book, Death of the First Idea, which is great, and Sofia Samatar’s Opacities. But most recently, I just read Juliana Spahr’s book that just won the Pulitzer Prize, Ars Poeticas, which was really stunning. And then I also reread this book because I’ve been suggesting it for the past seven years to everyone who asked me about books, and then I was like, do I still love it? Is it true that I should continue to throw this book out? And that’s Srikanth Reddy’s book, Underworld Lit, which I think is one of the strangest, most inventive and exciting books of poems I’ve read in a long time, and it still holds up.

Poets.org: What are you currently working on in your writing, teaching, and publishing life? 

Sax: Yeah, thank you, that’s exciting. In my teaching life, I’ve been working on this lecture about Édouard Glissant, and particularly his argument about the right to opacity, and about opacity in poetry and in visual art practice. And so I’ve been working on that lecture for a smidgen, and I’ve also been preparing for this conversation with Molly Crabapple on her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, which is a history of the labor Bunds—the Jewish leftist, anti-Zionist, socialist movement in Eastern Europe. And I’ve been thinking a little bit about the sort of collision and overlap between Glissant and the Bunds, which has been a fun thing, just because of the happenstance of when they show up in my life.

And then in my sort of creative work, I’m working on a book called “Undisciplined,” loosely, or that’s the name of the Word document or the document I’m working in. And that’s a [sic] ekphrastic book loosely, and it borrows its formal materials and strategies from other art practices, so there are poems in the shape of music scores, in the shape of Fluxus scores, thinking about the choreographic languages and how that might inform the shape or structure or material of a poem. And so that’s also tied into my teaching work because I teach in an interdisciplinary arts program, and often, I’ll just hear stories about the history of art and I’m like, “Oh, that’s already a poem. How do I lock that down?” And “undisciplined” may be the title or it may just be my methodology of making this book.

And I’m also working on my second novel, which right now is called “Reproduction, or the Hatred of Children,” and it’s thinking about why we reproduce ourselves, our artwork, our ideology, our politics, and the afterlives of those decisions for different characters, and also, there’s a photographer who steals a baby at the heart of the book.

Poets.org: [laughs] Interesting subplot. I want to talk a little bit about your third and most recent collection, Pig, which I’ve really enjoyed, and it’s appropriately titled because the collection to me is rather voracious in formal content. There’s an abecedarian; there’s an epithalamium; and I think the pig works so smartly as a metaphor in which to explore ... It’s a metaphor that encompasses both desire, we talked about that briefly earlier, desire and repulsion, and such an apt metaphor for talking about American consumption. But the pig is a motif that shows up quite a bit, I’ve noticed, in your work. This time, you’ve dedicated an entire collection to it, but the pig is also evoked in the poem “Ultrasound” from your second collection, Bury It. Can you talk a little bit more about why you’ve become so fixated on the pig as a motif and metaphor? 

Sax: Thank you for that question. Yeah, the cover of that book also has got a pig right in the middle of it in sort of Boy Scout drag, like a pig in a little Boy Scout outfit.

Poets.org: Yes [laughs].

Sax: I think between my second and my third book, I had just been writing into the strange, unknown interstices of my obsessions, and those tended to orbit constructions of gender and masculinity, policing and state violence, the transgressive nature of desire. And then my buddy, Hieu Minh Nguyen, the poet, he, I think, gestured that they’re like, “Oh, all these are about pigs.” And I was like, “Oh! [laughs] I guess that’s right.” And then so I went ahead and dedicated the next seven years of my life to making that book, to doing research, and also when you work on a project and tell all your friends about it, they send you materials, and so I’ve got a shelf filled with pig bobble [sic] and paraphernalia. I’ve got a whole shelf dedicated to histories of the pig or theory surrounding “pigness,” and then a lot of children’s books, of course.

I don’t know. I think we as people map a bunch of assumptions onto animals, and for me, the pig as a species that was built and evolved through domestication and that we evolved alongside, carry multiple traditions and histories alongside each other, and so the figure of the pig changes across human history. The reason why Jews don’t eat pork and Christians don’t eat pork was a matter of city infrastructure and domestication, and that made its way into religious law.

So I don’t know, I think as I began to focus on the pig, the animal, it opened up, and to me, in the similar way as poetry, became expansive and unknowable and multi-variant and possible. But yeah, I think what initially drove me to the pig as a symbol is there’s a kind of centrality it has, both to our food practice and our culture, and also it orbits this question of transgressiveness, of mass consumption, of desire, of filth, and so yeah, it orbits all of these questions that I’m drawn to and have always been drawn to as a writer.

Poets.org: And so much about the human condition is encompassed in the pig, like all of those things that you just mentioned. All of the things that we love about ourselves and hate about ourselves can really be summed up inside of the pig. And of course, you use, very astutely, the Three Little Pigs fable to anchor it, which I thought was really impressive as well [laughs].

Sax: Great. 

Poets.org: So it’s so funny to me that your upcoming collection is tentatively titled “Undisciplined,” because your work to me is so structured and so careful.

Sax: Yeah, thanks. I’m really interested in the history of artistic disciplinarity and also academic disciplinary, and how though and art practice became fragmented and structured into these narrow ways of thinking, which I think is not always historically stable. I feel like a lot of our first poets were also dentists and scholars and seers and community organizers, and I think that’s also true now, and I think there’s something about the hyper-fragmentation of both the “career of a writer,” but also how knowledge is produced in sort of discreet containers that feels just untrue to me.

Poets.org: Well, thank you so much, Sam. This has been great.

Sax: Oh, yay. OK, great. Thanks. Yeah, great chatting with you.