Bøger af Dean Young

Young uses the surreal as the thread which weaves in and out of complications of existence. The result is a textured, honest work that grapples with what it means to love, lose, and hang in the afterward.

With rapid shifts between subject and tone, sometimes within single poems, Dean Young's latest book explores the kaleidoscopic welter of art and life. Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes the joke. With surrealist volatility, these poems are the result of experiments that continue for the reader during each reading. Young moves from reworkings of creation myths, the index of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, pseudo reports and memos, collaged biographies, talking clouds, and worms, to memory, mourning, sexual playfulness, and deep sadness in the course of this turbulent book.

To read Dean Young's Elegy for the Last Male Northern White Rhino is to know that "One idea is a door can be opened / by pressing your forehead against / a sheet of paper." Meanwhile he is passing through the entryway carrying reams. In this new chapbook he is at work, stacking the broken rowboats as he suggests that there is always one more dimension. He has spent years "in a steel cage counting syllables." Come now. Count with him.

After more than 12 years, Dean Young's second book of poetry, Beloved Infidel, is back in print.

In this book Young presents poems of varying tones and styles, emphasizing the nature of simultaneity and the power of wordplay.

In The Art of Recklessness, Dean Young's sprawling and subversive first book of prose on poetry, imagination swerves into primitivism and surrealism and finally toward empathy. How can recklessness guide the poet, the artist, and the reader into art, and how can it excite in us a sort of wild receptivity, beyond craft? "Poetry is not a discipline," Young writes. "It is a hunger, a revolt, a drive, a mash note, a fright, a tantrum, a grief, a hoax, a debacle, an application, an affect . . ."