The guy across the street is on fire.
When you finish Sam Sax’s Yr Dead (McSweeney’s, 2024), you are sitting on the couch late at night and glance up to discover your next-door neighbor ablaze. His entire body, a flash of white flame. Or, maybe you are looking at a real-life vision of Sax’s narrator, Ezra, whose self-immolation opens the novel. The fever dream outside your living room window feels possible for a brief moment: Sax creates a ghost so deeply alive in Ezra that you almost expect him to dance off the page into reality, not only breaking the laws of life and death but of fact and fiction. Poet Sax’s Yr Dead is a fire-engine red debut of a novel, crossing dimensions and oceans, at once devastating and funny as hell. Ezra’s retelling of life after death is a rapid flipbook through queer and Jewish experience. You could not exorcize this ghost if you tried.
Then, a sudden boom overhead shakes you. You look again.
Your neighbor only lit a sparkler on the ground, his T-shirt reflecting a waterfall of neon light. Shadows on the sidewalk cheer at stray fireworks. It’s the Fourth of July. All day, social media chewed itself raw over recent Supreme Court rulings on Chevron, abortion, and criminalizing homelessness. Futility yawned across the feeds. “This is the bad place,” an anonymous user commented. You hear Ezra say, “The internet is a portal into the suffering of others—sometimes their joy, though mostly, just their suffering.” Voices on the street hoot into the evening, as if someone told a joke, but you are too far away to catch the punchline.
Yr Dead is a propulsive read, wildfire writing leaving nothing behind. Sax orchestrates a firework display of memory and mythology in Ezra’s life, a series of flashbacks told through lyrical flash. Before and after his death, Ezra lives as a ghost. His dad has become a stranger, selling holy water on Amazon with his new friends from the synagogue basement. A date with the adorable intern from the STI clinic would be lovely, but instead: an actual STI. Ezra sometimes remembers a mother, long gone. Lovers enter, for better or worse. He’s trying to navigate a world where all the rodents and birds and bugs with beautiful names are going extinct.
Ezra longs to belong without joining, unable to find footing in an “ironized and ironed-on country” where an Apple Watch release draws a larger crowd than a protest. For him, the protestors display as artificial a face as the Apple Watch, roleplaying caring: “You can see in their straightened postures the purpose this gives them and it makes me sick.” So Ezra adapts and feigns a smile like everyone else. He plays Pokémon to keep up with the discourse and attempts to outwit his therapist with perfect grief. Then, Ezra times his death to join the 27 Club, alongside Basquiat, Cobain, and Winehouse (though he’s put off by Morrison’s shitty poetry).
Ezra remains obsessed with books “where the ordinary is made to seem epic.” Sax arguably writes that book while challenging whether that book can exist anymore. Who is ordinary in a world that makes extraordinary demands for survival?
Yr Dead is saturated with ghosts and ghostings as if to rebuke death or redefine its borders. Ezra fulfills his wish to be “a minor augury, the oracle at Delphi huffing fumes off the bituminous limestone,” but only by dying. He sees all and says little in life. After death, all pretense is burned away, and a chorus of family and folk history rises to meet him. Ezra vocalizes collective history through a great-great-grandmother, phantom goats, and a goldfish-like experience of time, “almost as if there’s no continuity at all between tomorrow and what precedes it.” His ancestral line spreads into a tree, each trunk a life, the root system allowing the individual to “pass through different worlds.” He and his great-grandfather chew on the same dilemma decades apart: the problem of being the object of history. This irresolution could be depressing; instead, the question sounds like hope, a long-distance telephone call home. Two ghosts, sharing secrets.
Sax’s prose is its own ghost gliding between rooms or words, refusing to settle into dust. He whittles each sentence into perfect shape with sharp wit, refusing to nail down a noun: “I say shitheads but mean only boys. I say boys and mean some kind of mollusk, hard-shelled with tender meat inside.” Shitheads are boys are mollusks. This is always that, aslant. Sax offers queer poetics at the sentence level, stretching this sensibility to the narrative. You are reading Ezra, and then you are reading a great-great-grandmother, formed from the same root system. This speaker is also that, aslant. You slip into someone else’s voice before you realize what’s happening. This polyvocal movement feels distinctly anticolonial, as if no one voice could hold a life, as if no one voice should.
Storytelling becomes a life force, more vital than blood, carried on even after Ezra dies. Sax weaves fictionalized Jewish folk tales into Ezra’s flashbacks, collective stories of goats, sacrifices, and boys lost down wells. These stories claim the same space as Ezra’s personal history, equalizing their truths. In a 2024 McSweeney’s interview, Sax says, “The stories carried through and invented in diaspora are more foundational to my understanding of Judaism than any argument for statehood or the settler-colonial logic of Zionism.” Ezra thinks through these power structures explicitly, even as a teenager. On his high school Birthright trip, he wonders, “Can you really go back to the neighborhood your great-great-great-grandparents might have lived in and say, This is my house? Not caring who lives there?”
You search for articles on Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation to protest Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. When you search for the woman who self-immolated in Georgia outside the Israeli consulate, the top articles all erase her name. Ezra whispers, “I imagine the major media outlets will do their best to suppress the images of me. But of course, every American at this time has little eyes in their pockets.” You read articles on Maxwell Azarello’s self-immolation, and you still do not know enough names, not, as Ezra says, “the people who lit themselves on fire in Chicago. In East Texas. In Greece, or Israel, or Bulgaria, or Poland, or India, or China, or Saudi Arabia, or –, or –, –.”
At a protest, Ezra grows “nauseated by the pageantry—the photo-op signage, the three-hundred-dollar jackets with political slogans pre-sewn-in, the mind numbingly repetitive chanting.” You open Instagram to a meme criticizing an ad for Walmart keffiyehs, captioned, “Systemic change for collective liberation.” The caption states, “we are confused.”
Before language, Ezra remembers infancy as “a collage of fractured sound, a shouting color.” When Ezra describes this time, he says “I try to speak to those beside me, but we can’t find our common tongue, so we cry. All of us making noise with no form.” When you try to imagine self-immolation beyond pixels, you can only hear a similar noise: crying. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, as of July 31, the death toll in Gaza stands at 39,480 people, including more than 15,000 children. Ezra says, “I open my computer and it breaks my heart. I close my computer.”
Except Sax insists on formlessness that remains after the bonfire burns away. A voice. A flipbook of images. A haunting. However you describe life, the whole deepens in death. You can still see every image, if you want to. As if to say: You have a computer. You have a heart. Open them.
The problem with writing about futility in the face of “a hundred different apocalypses on the horizon” is attempting to solve that immensity on the page. Ezra self-immolates for no cause and every cause at once. Ezra is flight and fight and freeze. Ezra is every human with an ounce of empathy and urgency on this earth right now. By insisting that Ezra’s ordinary life is epic, Sax shows that every life must be epic, holding everyone accountable. No one can sit out.
Sax undoes the brutal assumption that suicide is the product of loneliness alone, that a person would turn away from the void if they understood their worth to the collective. Ezra greets death with the swell of ancestry and history behind him, then he chooses the fire anyway.
Yr Dead offers a harder possibility. Ezra walks the city, over and over, drawn toward the crowds, not away from them. But the bridges that connect us often become blockages. Language gets in the way of speaking. Our communication devices get in the way of communicating. A tender throughline between Ezra and his most embodied friend Ericka turns on Ezra’s ghosting of zir. He pleads sadness. Ze chastizes him, “it’s been like six months asshole . . . everyone’s sad dude.” The safety of digital spaces sustains their friendship, like so many modern relationships. In-person, they pull away. They become ghosts to each other, unable to cross the divide. “To be made to bear awareness” of another is hard work. To allow yourself to be accepted by another is even harder.
Ezra might posture at a distance from love, chalking its chaotic nature up to “a series of hormones released in the brain that deludes a person into building a life and network that will help propagate their genetic line.” But if the entire world burns, queer love scorches. Is it worse to mourn your lover or to forget them entirely? Again the novel tugs at an anticolonial understanding of history, and who gets remembered over time. Sax points to the double cruelty of forgetting. Will your lover remember you? Will your community? Your nation? You hear the frantic calls to record Palestinian names, the fear that we’ll lose entire existences to history, along with their unnecessary deaths.
Sax resists hyper-individualism for the inverse: the almost unbearable truth that we are all connected on this wounded, burning planet. And to be bound hurts like hell. Ezra says in an offhand manner, “Things just sort of happen to me.” Which is to say, he absorbs trauma. When faced with personal experiences of violence, Ezra blames himself, accepting responsibility for his own wound. But with each blow, his gaze widens out and out, until he is as detached as a ghost. You could call that transcendence. Or dissociation. On this planet, is there a difference? Before self-immolation, Ezra wonders if burning himself alive is narcissism, whether he could affect anything at all with such a small action.
You have to consider what possible world could produce a question like that.
For those of us still breathing, Sax offers help. Yr Dead is a deeply queer book, offering a lift out of the ashes through a generous levity. Ezra burns off trauma like a phoenix with the humor of a survivor, who must transform every violence through laughter. (An abusive lover literally locks Ezra in the closet.) Sax’s writing is queer alchemy, using pain as fuel for a larger flame.
Except Ezra discovers that levity requires being lifted, as much as lifting, if too late. When he wanders through crowds and meetings searching for a place to belong, his desire might be simple: a community to pick you up when you cannot lift yourself. Remembering his death, Ezra says, the “precise moment I leave my body, I am being lifted.” Yr Dead’s heartbreak might be that the weight of the world has grown too heavy for us all, that the systemic shifts have tipped the scales too far. But if you don’t lift your share, there’s no way of knowing.
“Sometimes miracle is just another word for naming precisely what already exists,” Ezra says. Yr Dead is a miracle of a book, a brutal, bittersweet, beautiful study in transmuting history into what you do, instead of what has been done to you, even if the last thing you do is set yourself ablaze. I love this book with every fiber of my being, and I hate that as a world, we so desperately need its existence. Yr Dead is necessary reading, a survival guide for the years to come, and a beacon of hope for everyone who’s paying attention.
