Skid

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 25 FEB 2002

The talky, impatient verse of Young's fifth collection skids all over mainstream American culture and across the language, jumbling comic or startling phrases together in hot pursuit of comedy, shock or charm. "A swimming pool on the 18th floor?/ King Lear done by sock puppets?" Anything goes in a Young poem, especially if it makes the poet sound hip, or insouciant, or just plain strange: "Initially I too appeared between the legs/ of a woman in considerable discomfort," he opens one mock-autobiographical poem. "A poem should be/ a noise then it should know when to shut up./ It should be naked in the rain or nearly so"; "Tragically, I took over Sue's damaged iguana." Elsewhere, Young (First Course in Turbulence) visits "the Caf of One Thousand Adjectives" and "the Museum of This Moment" and pays homage (by name, repeatedly) to his poetic peers and friends Tony Hoagland and Mary Ruefle (both of whom blurb the book). At his best as in the mock-instructional "Whale Watch" Young makes one-of-a-kind, read-aloud poems from the verbal detritus he juggles. Set against their distant models in O'Hara or Ashbery, though, Young's poems can be far more predictable than their surfaces make them seem: they're light, sometimes information-free po-biz comedy for an information age. With this much fun (and this many inside jokes), however, Young's champions will hardly mind: as his speaker notes, "It's an unstable world, babe."