Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #203640 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 88 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Young is up to his old tricks again, cracking wise and surreal on all things animal, vegetable and mineral. This eighth collection—and McSweeney's/Believer Books' first poetry title—opens with the admonition: " 'They won't attack us here in the Indian graveyard.' / I love that moment" and proceeds to list other odd things loved and hated. It's hard not to smile for a poet who puts "time's finked imbroglio" and "the Age of Sweaty Dreams" in the same poem, or claims he thought the poetic form ottava rima was "a Renaissance hooker." The humor and energy of Young's poems often lie between a childish giddiness about life's oddities and an adult's bewildered sadness. Add some surreal language play ("just another ex nihilo yoyo grazing/ on the classical radio waves") and you've got the typical poem by Young (Elegy on Toy Piano). He does what he does as well as anyone can, at times brilliantly, but some of these poems risk becoming shtick ("Every bird knows/ only two notes constantly rearranged," admits Young). This volume could be three-quarters as long and twice as good. Nonetheless, Young has mastered his own style and way of thinking in poems. Only a rare poet can make a reader simultaneously cry and laugh this way. (Mar.)
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Customer Reviews

Fearless Leader
Prodigality--superhuman productivity-- is a famous sign of genius, and that's the case with Dean Young, as his fans know. People who suggest that he is publishing too much should just take a nap, or go back to their novels. In fact, though the books keep coming, there has been zero diminshment of inspiration; the poems continue to invent and try new backflips, and most importantly, they continue to testify to the beauty and terror of being alive. There isn't another American poet who is as genuiniely and effectively SINCERE and humanist as Young is; in some ways, all his energetic acrobatics serve to make a protectied space (protected by irony, protected by irrefutable demonstrations of the animal vitality of imagination-- a space in which the man can speak to his fellow humans about our rare condition. Younger American poetry is filled now with zany-ish Dean Young childfren, raised in Dean Young Daycare Centers around the country, fed Ritalin and Scrabble pieces--the worst lack all conviction, the best are filled with passionate intensity. Not DY's fault. The wave will break, and other kinds of poems will be written. And after it, if we are lucky, Young will still be writing his poems on the beach-- not to have a career, or win awards (he has won shockingly few) but because he Has to write them. He's one of our truest, most honest and human, and most brilliant poets. There used to be an expression--"an ornament of the age". Young is one of ours. We should just enjoy him.