Deathbed Sext (price includes shipping)
By Christopher Salerno
Winner of the 2019 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize
In the title poem, Christopher Salerno writes, “I want to waltz with you away from what// once was monstrously male/ about me and I also/ want to survive.” The and here is crucial, and emblematic of the collection, which poem after poem says yes, and. Yes, high and low culture. Yes, both sext and ghost as nouns “you can verb.” Yes, loving and leaving. Yes, familiar and strange; dead serious and absurd. “Everything is a piece of something else,” Salerno writes, and everything gets to stay, because these deftly crafted poems are elastic enough to hold it all. — Maggie Smith, Contest Judge
The title nabbed me, the sext trope hooked me, but the poems—the poems—far exceed the nab and the hook. Numinous, masterfully crafted, rife with allusion, Salerno’s lines mark the page with a surgical precision and delicacy. He pins back the flaps of masculinity, its privilege and its vulnerability, its lewdness and its fear, the unarticulated wound of it, “how some bruises/flower, spread like steam on the mirror/blurring all beauty.” Without false heroics or glibness, Salerno enacts his own sexted desire: “May we become/to bravery what saying is to the sentence.” — Diane Seuss
