All books are available directly from the publishers. All books are also available from The Germanna Community College Bookstore in Fredericksburg, VA and Amazon and Barnes & Noble, except Final Inventory.

My Amazon author page is HERE

You may also email  davidanthonysam@ gmail.com to arrange a purchase signed copies from me. I accept PayPal to @davidanthonysam.

NEW!
Geographies of the Dead (2024) from Kelsay Books ($23) and available from Amazon

Geographies of the Dead’s elegies, written to memorialize individuals, also speaks to the universal experience of loss while its meditations explore the absences that return to us in memory or as ghosts in dreams. The poems have been described as “revelatory,” “powerful,” “haunting,” and “eloquently crafted.” While offering no answers to the unanswerable, the collection explores accommodations with death though science, the natural world, and our common human experience.

The following either have poems dedicated to them and/or elegies written about them:

• Betty Baker
• Donald Bivens
• Richard “Rick” Brehm
• Larry Cramer
• Dominic Deluka
• Richard Dine
• William “Bill” Hidenfelter
• Galway Kinnell
• Thomas Kon
• Doris Roe
• Starr Dave Sam (nee Nejma Dawood)
• William “Bill” Shuter
• Don Staake
• Jane Wallace

And my mother, Ann. and father, Tony.

What other poets are saying:

In revelatory verse in his haunting new collection, David Anthony Sam writes of a world steeped in mortality. The poems travel unflinchingly forth, from early perplexities over death to a stoic peace before the inscrutable. “I do not surrender / the solitary thought / to fantasies that believe themselves….” Yet, the poet’s deep empathy with what is both beautiful and in the process of dying saves us from devastating sadness.

• Sofia M. Starnes, Virginia Poet Laureate, Emerita and author of The Consequence of Moonlight

In Geographies of the Dead, David Anthony Sam offers a poignant and elegant depiction of the topography shaping our interrelationships with the dead. Geographies is a brilliant collection of elegies to loved ones lost and meditations on how our interrelationships with the ghosts that haunt us shape both who we are and who we become as we draw nearer to death. The poems are powerfully written, eloquently crafted, and well worth thoughtful visitation.

• Steve Bucher, PhD, author of We Stay a Brief Telling

Within Geographies, David Anthony Sam invokes all seasons—as well as physics, medicine, memory, and nature herself—to share that which is for many the most private of emotions: grief. His words, both honeyed reminisce “of the time when all words / were untasted wine”  and hard truth (“all biographies / end with the same page”) offer anecdotes and perspectives to lay at the altar of those who have gone before, acknowledging his intimacy with this shadowed landscape, surefootedly guiding us, Virgil-esque, from the sweet to the bitter and back again.

• Joanna Lee, author of Dissections and Poet Laureate, Richmond, Virginia

In Geographies of the Dead, David Anthony Sam shares elegies and meditations on death, loss, and grief from multiple perspectives of time and space. Sam instills in readers a yearning to hear more, see more, feel more from those we loved and lost, providing the geography for our own explorations, exposing dark and light in our journeys.

• Cathy Hailey, author of I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth andNorthern Region VP of The Poetry Society of Virginia

Stone Bird: Poems of Exile (2023) from San Francisco Bay Press ($14.99) and available from Amazon

What other poets are saying:

Stone Bird is a book of exile and abandonment: physical, emotional, and geographical. In this collection of poems, David Anthony Sam draws on his Syrian ancestry and presents a world filled with “echoes of beggars’ cries / and wails of the muezzins, and images / from barren olive groves and vineyards / empty of any fruit, bleak of any leaf.” It is a deserted landscape which he paints, a landscape which reflects the inner loss he tries to come to terms with – of faith, of identity and, ultimately, of love. The poems are filled with images of the desert, of simooms, of cities long forgotten and of people struggling to reclaim their identity.  And throughout it all, the stone bird stands in mute silence, so ossified that “should a jinni / animate his rock, / he still would not fly.” Sam’s poems speak to the heart and illuminate the soul.

Mike Maggio’s latest collection, Let’s Call It Paradise, was released in 2022.

I have read poems and other genres of books about exile. But I have been fortunate to feel at home most everywhere I have ever been – except in the exile of marriage. Not until I read this collection of poems by David Anthony Sam did I realize all these years it had been lurking around every corner trying to banish me.

Nathan M. Richardson; Poet, author and Frederick Douglass Historian

With beautiful language, imaginings and truths, Stone Birds is a haunting tale of exile. Sam’s compilations of Syrian ancestral memories ache with ambivalence, bringing to mind such celebrities as Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, who defected to the United States but eventually moved back to the USSR. Sam maintains the metaphor of a stone bird paired with dry dessert in such elegant descriptions as “…and my breath dust/blown by a wind/that laughs from my lungs.” All is not despair. In eloquent use of paradox, Sam offers uplifting introspection in “The Exile’s Equinox”: “Perhaps he is wholly enough./Perhaps he is profane enough./Perhaps the distance he has come/is the profoundest of his faiths.”

Terry Cox-Joseph, artist and poet, author of Between Then and Now, Finishing Line Press, 2018.

Writing the Significant Soil from Wayfarer Books ($18.00)

and available from Amazon.
Winner of the 2021 Homebound Poetry Prize

Writing the Significant Soil by David Anthony Sam explores the long relationship of human life with nature without sentimentality or the cold distance of the clinical eye. Sam’s poems reveal his own close connection with the Appalachian Mountains and the red clay of the MidAtlantic and Virginia as he searches for meaning in the act of living on and with the land by using the poetic ink he makes from the soil. The history of Virginia, bled into the earth by war and human struggle to live, interplays with the war we have made against nature and the land. The collection admits the danger we humans impose on the natural world while revealing a simple faith that that natural world will abide even as we as individuals give our identity back into the land we sprang from. The soil is significant in and of itself as life-giving place and because of our history of living on it.

What other poets are saying:

David Anthony Sam sings the psalms of our landscapes and skies — “declaration of rising sunsets,” “mis-placed stars,” and “a wave of feathers / breaking.” He weaves together lamentation and faith: “Now that I am peaceful to the bees, / they are lost to lice and viruses/…I do become the hope of honey.” Loss and acceptance—“Fire has always been.” His stunning articulations of the detrimental intersections between the natural world and humanity leaves me wounds split open, but with the salve of this life’s persistent beauty, “It is a new season.”

-Angie Dribben, Everygirl 2020 finalist for Broadkill Review Dogfish Head Prize

What is a world but the many ways of our reckoning of it, with it? Sometimes we meet it with muscle, other times with uncertainty or wavering despair. Swinging between changes of weather, we sift through limestone, red clay, and black bread. The snail keeps on, surely; even silences are a honey thickening in wells. “Make ink from what is burned,” says David Anthony Sam in Writing the Significant Soil; give words to a life of meaningful cultivation.

–Luisa A. Igloria, 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia; author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (2020)

During a time when the natural world is increasingly under assault, David Anthony Sam’s poems are especially relevant. He examines nature with the eye of a scientist and the reverential awe of a mystic. Whether he writes about sap from a maple during sugaring time, granite boulders in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Julius Caesar’s last breath, or “atoms [that] ring / with the surprise of one true bird” in his body, he startles us with refreshing insights and identifications. He would say with Whitman: “And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Writing the Significant Soil demonstrates the sort of empathy that we all need to keep the Earth and ourselves whole and healthy.

-Henry Hart, Professor at College of William and Mary; 19th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1028-20); author of The Ghost Ship, The Rooster Mask, and Background Radiation

Dark Fathers from Kelsay Books ($18.50)

and available from Amazon.

Through a series of interrelated poems, Dark Fathers recounts a very individual yet universal story of fathers and sons. The fathers are literally dark in their youth: the grandfather born in Syria, the father and son in Pennsylvania, and all having dark hair. But there is a figurative darkness that comes from bitter disappointment–in the self, in the opportunities the country failed to offer (at least in the beginning), and of the father for the son.

The first father dies before forgiveness can be found. The story of the second father and son is one of betrayals and eventual reconciliation only hinted at in this book.

In this collection, David Anthony Sam offers an honest and bare telling of the pain fathers and sons give each other and themselves. Love may not be easy for some men, but this is a set of loving poems

What others are saying:

In Dark Fathers, David Anthony Sam examines the bitter-sweet juxtaposition of life, death, genetics and the cosmos, Sam provides the reader with a balance and harmony that great poetry and great art illuminates in ways that pure science and pure logic just can’t seem to manage. Sam’s poetry contemplates every aspect of our mortality and the entire universe here “At the Edge of Stars.” All of the miracles of existence just seem to vanish with us. Yet, somehow, none of these poems seem to despair, allowing the reader to be blown into a mist and then regathered as something new and renewed.
-Professor Todd Neuman, Editor Emeritus, The Hurricane Review.

In Dark Fathers, David Anthony Sam picks at the scab of childhood memories wreathed in ribbons of his father’s cigarette smoke. His father was a man “who knew love / only as a hard, thin edge / of glinting blue steel / scraping across his cheek. Through poems suffused with a mixture of anger and regret, Sam bleeds his personal history onto the page and transforms it into a universal truth that all fathers and sons will take to heart.

-Bill Glose, author of Virginia Walkabout, Personal Geography, Half a Man, and The Human Touch

In Dark Fathers and Other Poems, David Anthony Sam holds a match to the fuse of familial tension. His reflective vignettes smolder with a desire for acceptance, love, and forgiveness that refuses to remain in the attic with discarded childhood toys. This poet dares to examine his self-image through unblinking eyes in a “face too like my father’s.” As sharp edges of the past soften with time and distance, David embraces an identity dependent upon, yet independent of, the paternal relationship: “you flow here / in my transient river,” a river that “drifts with silence towards / the open prayer of ocean.” This lyrical journey evokes the beautiful ache that defines so many human bonds.

-Elizabeth Spencer Spragins, author of The Language of Bones: American Journeys Through Bardic Verse and With No Bridle for the Breeze: Ungrounded Verse.

Final Inventory
(Chapbook from Prolific Press $8.95)

Final Inventory contains the deeply personal poetry by the author, David Anthony Sam, written as his mother was dying and in the years after. Here, Sam celebrates his mother’s life and her impact on him, grapples with her dying and his helplessness to ease her from this life, and mourns her by “mothering himself a new life” absent her powerful presence. Words are a gift his mother gave him, given that she loved to read and was an author herself albeit with few publications. So it is appropriate that Sam use those words to honor her as well as convey the journey that (while individual here to the two of them) is nonetheless a universal one.