Review of sad boy / detective by sam sax
This review originally appeared in Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Volume 44, 2016.
sam sax, sad boy / detective (New York: Black Lawrence Press, 2015), 25 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Jeff Boruszak.
Any good detective—whether it’s Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, or Encyclopedia Brown relies on deductive reasoning in his or her investigations. By making observations and noting patterns, trained gumshoes can solve their case with a specific, logical conclusion. Deduction is useful if you’re investigating a mysterious disappearance, when the knowledge that doors always open toward their hinges invalidates a suspect’s otherwise bulletproof alibi. But what happens when what you’re investigating is the meaning behind your own existence?
Such is the self-appointed task for the pubescent sleuth of sam sax’s second chapbook, sad boy / detective. sax, who in 2015 was both an NEA Creative Writing Fellow and a finalist for the prestigious Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, presents a sequence of twenty-three sonnets that take the physical and emotional hardships of burgeoning adolescence as the foundation for its ontological inquiry. Equal parts bildungsroman, Agatha Christie, and Sylvia Plath, this chapbook is simultaneously decadently depressing and imminently relatable for anyone who felt different growing up.
The boy/detective’s investigation assumes a connection between being and intimately knowing one’s self, which is drawn into crisis with the “birdt” of its protagonist at the start of puberty: “some time, twelve years deep, the amniotic fluid dried / and he became a boy. looked in a clean mirror, saw mystery. from then on the boy dealt only in ciphers.” The moment when one’s own body changes in ways that make you unrecognizable to yourself is alienating, while also introducing the mystery of existence. Like a shadow in a cracked Lacanian mirror, a unified knowledge of self is the veritable Maltese Falcon for the boy detective, and he begins to look for himself in the surrounding world.
What he discovers are the lessons that we all eventually learn. Our parents are merely human, with sexual desires and bodies that die. School is cruel for those that barely know themselves and their changing awkward bodies. Your body is open to exploration, experiment and discovery, but your heart is prone to be broken. What the boy detective desires more than anything else is to be the same as everyone else—but to do that he must be anybody but himself. This is especially true on Halloween, when the boy dresses in drag:
the detective only puts on a mouthful of rouge,
a gold dragonfly brooch. she walks into the night
by herself. goes door to door. grown folks open
for her. ask what she’s dressed as. she says myself.
bats her vampire eyelashes, sashays down the street
flooded with dead men and memories no one looks
how they should. halloween stretches into spring.
she stays painted long after everyone gets undressed.
Appearances are everything for the detective—after all, deductive reasoning relies on the repetition of appearances to draw conclusions. But here deduction becomes a liability, as it leads the boy to remain in his costume. This detective too closely associates how one appears with what one actually is.
Throughout these sonnets, queerness plays a central role, as the boy detective finds what he wants to become in other boys: “if you look hard enough into another person I you see yourself. that’s how the boy first found I love.” TI1e boy detective’s search for self is a quest for similitude that might break the deep loneliness he feels. sax emphasizes the body as present and material, and the poems spill over with explicit and lyrically rich descriptions of erotic encounters that straddle the line between objective anatomical notation and fierce passion:
later the boy detective took him into his mouth.
noted the sponged expansion of blood. conjectured
this boy would buck when he ran his tongue over
the frenulum. and he did. gunned down deer,
twitching between life and its opposite. love
is spilt milk. is control anyway that you can.
The boy’s desire to be with someone who resembles himself extends beyond these erotic encounters, however. The boy fantasizes that he has an older brother, or that another boy in the future might find and treasure the corpse of his deceased cat. In both cases, a sense of utter loneliness punctuates the boy’s desire to find himself through others.
In 2016 Teen Vogue included sam sax in their List of “9 young poets making the genre cool again,” and in sad boy / detective it’s easy to see why. This is the poetry you wish you were capable of writing as a teenager. Because the narrative focuses on a boy in his early teens, the writing oozes angst-but it never feels cliche or trite. Rather than writing poems that would only appeal to teens in the throes of puberty’s terrors, the emotional tenor and the immediacy of sax’s language make the boy detective’s desire for intimacy engaging and irresistible. sax convincingly makes the case that intimacy, whether it is with others or with ourselves, is paramount—but impossible.