From CLASH Books March 2023, a literary meditation on sex. Sam Heaps is a millennial Anaïs Nin, exploring their most intimate power struggles with a raw and artful voice.

Each partner is a new mask through which the narrator discovers themselves, creating a song through each personal essay of desire and regret — a pop melody with blues undertones. Heaps lets readers become the ultimate voyeurs, displaying nakedly what we secretly feel in our most intimate moments. Proximity brings you skin to skin with your own unspoken desires.

HYPE

“Roman á clef, erotic memoir, and scathing breakup letter, Proximity pulses with pain and desire, requires total abandonment, and demands that we take pleasure in the way it wounds us. I felt drunk on its power.” 

—Sarah Gerard, author of BINARY STAR and TRUE LOVE: A NOVEL

“Calling this book “brave” is an understatement. This is a dizzying, heartbreaking punch-to-the-gut masterwork. Heaps rides through their past like Kali, forging something that is equal parts beautiful and terrifying.”

—Juliet Escoria, author of BLACK CLOUD and JULIET THE MANIAC

“Proximity, as a noun, is the singular most important aspect of how to love another person. How close can you be to a person, and how close they can be to you, defines an entire relationship--the distance therein an experience of euphoria or abject fright. Heaps' essay collection will grip you, from one end to the other of this experience. Prepare to be ravaged.”

—Elle Nash, author of GAG REFLEX and ANIMALS EAT EACH OTHER  

“Equally invested in noticing and being noticed, Heaps’s memoir achieves a statelieness that narratives about sexual reckonings rarely obtain. Ostensively a narrative of desire (and awkwardly, gutturally, blissfully, there is much of that), what emerges from their story is not a diary of titillation, but a beautiful and elegiac love story. It is an autopsy all the same—and a startling one.”

—J. Howard Rosier, Board Member, National Book Critics Circle

“Proximity is a fearless debut—a formally adventurous book that stunned me with pleasure. Shrewd and wrenching, sacred and profane, Proximity takes an unsentimental look at sex and gender, power and poverty. Heaps may have starved themselves—physically and psychically—but in this book they sing the flesh back onto their bones.”

—Sara Levine, author of TREASURE ISLAND!!! and SHORT DARK ORACLES

“The ancient Greeks regarded eros as disruptive and often ruinous; a form of delirium that alights upon our lives and changes us utterly, not always for the better. In this modern age, a whole lot of us act (and write) as if there's an eventual order, even romance of the halcyon variety, to the whole endeavor. But not Sam Heaps, who possesses the unnerving and exceptional ability to render this sort of wanting as the affliction that it really is, however much pleasure might come with it. 

In Proximity, desire is hot-blooded and alive in all its delirious, wounding, ecstatic manifestations.”

—Alina Pleskova, author of TOSKA and co-editor of BEDFELLOWS

“Proximity is haunting, stylish, and bold--a beautiful, aching litany of want. Full of heat and relentless lust, bald vulnerability, and unapologetic darkness, this book skillfully excavates desire, turns it inside out, touches every part of it. Heaps is a ferocious talent, and this is a heart-shattering debut.”

—Kimberly King Parsons, author of BLACK LIGHT

“Fiercely intelligent and intense, Proximity asks readers to enter the dark heart of desire. It’s the rare kind of complex, immersive work that reminds you that to fall in love is to find both heaven and hell.”

—Lindsay Lerman, author of I’M FROM NOWHERE and WHAT ARE YOU

Sam Heaps writes like a banshee with their hair on fire, like a force of nature. The many desires at the lusty heart of their exhilarating debut remind us of all that is lost and all that is gained when we give ourselves over—even for just a few minutes—to another human being. It revels in and celebrates its wide-eyed openness to every physical sensation. There’s freedom here, and joy. It's beautiful. Proximity reads to me like an immediate classic of erotic literature that is also so much more than that.

 —Andrew Ervin, author of BURNING DOWN GEORGE ORWELL’S HOUSE

Sam Heaps is a genderqueer writer, visual artist, and organizer. They are a 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop Scholar and a 2022 VCCA Fellow. You can find more of their work in Entropy, Taco Bell Quarterly, Communion Arts Journal, and many other publications. PROXIMITY is their first book. Heaps currently lives in Philadelphia, where they teach writing at the University of the Arts.

OFFICIAL RELEASE MARCH 2023

ISBN: 9781955904292