Some poems are air; some are water; some are a jail or a galloping horse. Sam’s poems are a window into a multi-modal, multi-layered world of language(s) and speaker(s) entwined, where both are a galloping horse (sometimes the language(s) is/are the horse(s), sometimes, the horseman) – or a jail, or water, or air.

Without, there is a symbolic landscape – as if created by Hieronymus Bosch – with a typewriter, or a laptop, or an old-fashioned pen(cil). In A translation for nothing, the first of the Two Glitches, St. Teresa of Avila echoes both Silentium, a lyric poem by the Russian romantic poet Fyodor Tyutchev, where the speaker laments that “a thought expressed becomes a lie” and Poem 1212 by Emily Dickinson, which begins with “A word is dead /When it is said...” Lies, death, and violence are entwined: a lie is a type of violence, a type of death; a death is a lie, possibly, but also a violence; violence is a type of lie, possibly, and, certainly, a type of death, and so on, and so forth, ad infinitum. In the spirit of looking for origins, the themes for all three of these poems can be traced back to Psalm 115, whose speaker, in despair, exclaims “All men are liars”.

Similarly, Sam’s poetry establishes a conversation between languages and speakers, where the speaker becomes the language and vice versa. This recursive conversation between meaning-carrying and meaning-creating elements, which show the word as it is – a gun, a flower, a fragment of bloodied flesh, an etcetera personified – gives Sam’s poetics a profound spirituality. Sam, in his search of the origins, perhaps, his own, perhaps, the language’s/languages’, or all of these, retraces the breadcrumbs all the way back to the original loaf:

...for I will consider my glitch.

For I will consider the origin of the word.

For I will consider the gleam the glimmer

of the flaw bright in the heart

of the cracked stone

for I will remember the smooth and shine, thin film of melt

that flows between the frozen lake and the cutting steel

for the memory glistens as it runs

brief liquid between one forgetfulness

and the next...