Loose Change

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.