A luminous, darkly playful collection of poems that moves with equal ease through myth, scripture, history, domestic life, and the surreal textures of contemporary existence. 

In three interwoven sections—”King David,” “Loose Change,” and “Life with Atropos”—Sam Magavern’s Loose Change reimagines biblical figures, philosophers, ordinary laborers, animals, and dreamers with a voice that is by turns comic, tender, metaphysical, and elegiac. These poems assemble a mosaic of loss, desire, absurdity, memory, and endurance, finding flashes of beauty and meaning in the discarded, the humble, and the half-forgotten. With formal agility and a distinctive wit, Loose Change affirms poetry’s power to transfigure the everyday while confronting time, mortality, and longing with both gravity and radiance.

Sam Magavern is a writer and public interest lawyer in Buffalo, New York. His publications include a nonfiction book, Primo Levi’s Universe, and two books of poetry, Noah’s Ark and Ovid’s Creek. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry and The Paris Review. He is the founder of the Calamus Project, which celebrates Walt Whitman’s poetry with films, programs, and songs.