Shock by Shock
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"Dean Young challenges the reader to hang on as he jigs from one poetic style to another and sets a wondrous course across a Duchampian landscape."—Chicago Tribune
"In Young's work, the big essential questions—mortality, identity, the meaning of life—aren't simply food for thought; they're grounds for entertainment."—The Sunday Star (Toronto)
Dean Young escorts his transplanted heart into invigorating poetic territory that combines the joy of being alive with his signature mixture of surrealism, humor, and fast-cut imagery. A Pulitzer finalist known for his hard-won insights, NPR said it best when they observed that Young sees "even in the smallest things the heights of what we can be."
From "Harvest":
Bring me the high heart of a trapezist.
If not, bring me the heart of a drunk monk
so I may illuminate an ancient text
in a language I can't understand.
The brain too is blood, blood racing
100 miles an hour on training wheels
so let me splash through a red puddle,
let me kiss the face of a red puddle,
let me write my crazed, extreme demands
on the frost-cracked window of god's split
chest…
Dean Young is the author of twelve books of poetry, including finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and Griffin Award. He teaches at the University of Texas and lives in Austin.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his first collection of all-new work written after his 2011 heart transplant, Young (Bender) appears at his most mordant, and most mortal. "The wolf appointed to tear me apart/ is sure making slow work of it," he writes to open the book, and in the poems that follow, Young retains his considerable charms: a generous, tragicomic spirit, a guileless love of rhyme, and an acrobatic sense of logic and image. In "Crash Test Dummies of an Imperfect God," the eponymous subjects rapidly transform from "dumpster" to "snow cone" to "genital-faced bivalve." But these poems, which invite readers into the quotidian aspects of the poet's life and reflect on his career, are also unusually meditative for Young, who is better known for pyrotechnics. "I'm ready for my close-up./ I'm ready for my far-away," he writes in "Ghost Gust," one of several poems that figure his post-op survival as a kind of afterlife. Not all of the poems hit their mark (indeed, one likens poets to "blind knife throwers"), and the collection hardly represents a major stylistic shift, but its twilit tenor does give it an extra heft. Even with a borrowed heart, Young has a remarkable capacity to remind us of the ticking of our own.
