Published 10th November 2026
SPAM Press, Glasgow
ISBN: 978-1-915049-35-3
A5 | 60pp.
RRP: £9
Deliveries ship after 10th November; this is a preorder.
‘The sonnet is a fuse box’ in which ‘Lyricism | Wakes up in a cold sweat’. Welcome to Sam Rodilosso’s debut poetry book, a 60pp fury which takes on ‘America’s Monster Project’ and the polycrisis of our current, dilapidating epoch with intelligence and spirit. Fuse Box believes in the power of children to ‘make defence’ against ‘time’s scythe’ and mortality in general. Imagination is amplified by influence. As futurity collapses around us, Rodilosso registers the damage of the present in every iamb of the sonnet’s ornate circuitry, entwined in a triple crown of fuse / engrams / spectacle. This is a poetics of overload and what-the-fuckery, a poetics of voltaic leap and conscientious noticing, digital compression and confession. Fuse Box joins a global choir of people singing against extractivism, exploitation, hyper-militarism and neoliberal fascisms; it scintillates with the meltpoint of a crayola-drawn sun. Fuelled by his father’s saying, I love you Sam, I am time travelling through you, the poet evinces an unwavering refusal of capitalist foreclosures and moves headlong towards a loving future.
PRAISE for Fuse Box:
'The things we thought we had finished with aren’t done with us. Daisy-chaining and looping, Sam Rodilosso’s sonnet sequence is awash in big numbers. Tracking how far we’ve been yanked along by exponentialism, this poetry is inside that rush, but the abiding image is that of a dog patiently waiting for a volta, a real turn. I love how much these poems want everyone to persist.'
– Rob Kiely
'The work of Sam Rodilosso is at the same time a product of a tornado of influences ranging from Whitman, William Carlos Williams, HD, Hopkins, and more recently Peter Gizzi-but all the same he is a wondrous original, his work highly formal and mechanically impeccable while completely free and surprising in the way it remains open to the imagination. The three sonnet crowns in this marvelous book-'Fuse,' 'Engrams'' and 'Spectacle' each operate by a physics of their own, using when needs to the whole page, emojis, and radical enjambment to continuously re-envision and revise the sonnet's conventions.
'Fuse' may be one of my favorite crowns of all time-it as technically as close to perfection as any example of the form that I know. Sam Rodilosso proves himself a brilliant poet, even now, at the beginning of the journey.'
– David Keplinger
In this tightly wound triple crown, Sam Rodilosso questions whether the sonnet, 'an anxious metronome, counting' can express the terror of our countdown 'to the end of the end of everything'. Out of the corona, he spins his own celestial system, a dog named Stella, a paper mache star, the sun in solastalgia, Sidney's 'Astrophil and Stella', and this system expands by charging each element because 'The sonnet is a fuse box.' Wisely, Rodilosso worries about the weapons we've brought to this fight ('is the word a nail or a hammer?') when what we face is the crisis of a 'late-stage cancerous/power,' 'imminent disassembly,' the 'digital litter' of surveillance technology, and where, ultimately, 'the status quo is human death.' No longer 'beauty boxes,' sonnets may yet be 'harbingers' of our collective trauma, a pervasive anxiety calmed sometimes through exhaustion, the release of melancholy. In sonnets 'transitively braiding the world into a flower bracelet,' there is no trusting to Keatsian beauty and truth, instead the bracelet turns into a 'double helix, or a rat's nest of bomb wires.' Unsparingly frank and incisive, keeping company with Terrance Hayes, Diane Seuss, and Lyn Hejinian, Rodilosso presses the sonnet into 'the good work of inquiry.'
– Linda Voris, Professor of Literature, American University
About the author:
Born and raised on the Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis, Maryland, Sam studied International Relations and Creative Writing at American University in Washington D.C. before transferring to the University of Edinburgh to study English Literature. Since then, he has received a certification to teach English from Cambridge University, and has studied Chinese at Peking University. Sam is interested in the prospects of translation and global literary exchange.
