The Man Grave
Christopher Salerno

Winner of the 2020 Lexi Rudnitski Editor’s Choice Award

The Man Grave portrays the corrosiveness, violence, and loneliness of all-too-familiar strains of American masculinity. In perceptive and moving poems, Christopher Salerno explores patriarchy, boyhood, lust, misogyny and homophobia, infertility, and family in an effort to diagnose—and remedy—inherited patterns of manliness. “Have I / made it any further than my father / in his laughter, before his slaughter?” Salerno writes. His new collection is a moving and generous answer.

“Without false heroics or glibness, Christopher Salerno pins back the flaps of masculinity, its privilege and its vulnerability, its lewdness and its fear.”
—Diane Seuss

“Read this book to think deeply about what it means to be a man in 21st-century America.”
—Patrick Phillips

Christopher Salerno is a poet, the editor of Saturnalia Books, and Professor of Creative Writing at William Paterson University. He is the author of five poetry collections, and four chapbooks of poems. He lives in Caldwell, New Jersey

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-573.6 / 76 pages / Poetry