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Praise for Deathbed Sext (Winner of the 2019 Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize judged by Maggie Smith)
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
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,
Sample Poem:
THE DOUBLE IMAGE
I had sexted Anne Sexton and was stricken
with remorse & shamefacedness. No, this dream
was not about the flesh-and-blood Anne
Sexton, but about man’s inner woman, the Anima.
They said I’d never get her back, not with my eyes
in keyholes or by waiting for something small
to dilate. Everyone wants to know
what I felt after she left me palimpsestic--
her outline still visible against the wall
like some painted-over apostle. But I only fell
into endless confession like what the trees are doing
right now budding out their forelocks
for spring. I stand to watch the forsythia in its flare,
and the season having its portrait done
with such superlatives reminds me again
how lost I am when Anne does not appear.
I had sexted Anne Sexton and was stricken
with remorse & shamefacedness. No, this dream
was not about the flesh-and-blood Anne
Sexton, but about man’s inner woman, the Anima.
They said I’d never get her back, not with my eyes
in keyholes or by waiting for something small
to dilate. Everyone wants to know
what I felt after she left me palimpsestic--
her outline still visible against the wall
like some painted-over apostle. But I only fell
into endless confession like what the trees are doing
right now budding out their forelocks
for spring. I stand to watch the forsythia in its flare,
and the season having its portrait done
with such superlatives reminds me again
how lost I am when Anne does not appear.
