Dean Young

"Although his work comes out of the poetries of Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and Frank O Hara and James Tate, Young has his own original voice. The language, the invention, the imagination, and the sheer fun of his poems is astounding. It s not all dazzle either. The poems are also moving. This man reminds us that there is nothing more serious than a joke." Charles Simic, final judge and author of Jackstraws, Walking the Black Cat, and A Wedding in Hell "In this, the most beautiful of his three collections, Dean Young enlarges the project of North American Surrealism, gifting it with an entirely new intimacy and equally new range. His voice is sharply tender and mercifully unforgetful. These urgent, elegiac improvisations speed us towards millenium." Donald Revell, author of My Mojave, Arcady, and There Are Three

Poems

Strike Anywhere

In Solar Perplexus, Dean 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. Suddenly the boundaries of our everyday are shaken--and yet instead of being thrown off balance, our understanding is cracked open. Young holds us between un/reality, tracing the circle of life and death, and exposing the true closeness between extremes. It is this true intimacy that both unsettles and comforts. Solar Perplexus, turns identity on its head as it questions self (against) control, with each eerily familiar moment of humor, punctuated with an inevitable doubt.


Solar Perplexus

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

Elegy On Toy Piano

Dean Young is one of the premier surrealist poets writing today. In Skid, his fifth book of poems, social outrage vies with comic excess. He embraces the autobiographical urge with fury and musically lush exclamations. Whether through the dark facts of mortality or the celebratory surprises of the imagination, these poems proclaim vitality and alertness, wasting nothing. From Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner’s "Meep! Meep!" to remembrances of lost loves and laments about the future, Young’s poems reveal his faith in the genius of calamity and the redemptive power of fun.

Skid

Explores the nature of poetry and the importance of craft, imagination, and empathy in the creation of a poem.

Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction

The Art of Recklessness

Fall Higher is a major new collection by one of America’s most inventive and entertaining writers. Dean Young’s work contends with the turbulence of love—wryly cataloging mistakes, the deterioration of relationships, and broken vows. “But don’t despair,” he counsels readers. “There are designs that seem like chaos / only because you’re too close.” Young’s humor is as sharp as ever, coupled with a heart-earned vulnerability that renders Fall Higher his most intimate collection. Young urges us to “fall higher” until “there’s nothing left but hope.”

Fall Higher

In Bender, Dean Young’s collection of new and selected poetry, readers are treated to an array of Young’s prolific, inimitable work. Across the years, Young’s style has stayed consistently inconsistent, reliably innovative. It is this incongruity that benefits and frees Young’s work from poetic constraints. Bender gives readers opportunity to see Young’s surreal word play and witness Young, through the course of his career, become an iconoclastic force in American poetry.

Bender

Shock by Shock

Beloved Infidel

"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.

Jonathan Lethem

Steve Almond

Mary Ruefle

Edward Carey

Daniel Wallace

Caitlin Horrocks

Matthew Zapruder

Paul Lisicky

Rikki Ducornet

V. V. Ganeshananthan

Donald Revell

Tomaz Salamun

John Hilgart

Literary fiction with elements of the fantastic, the futuristic, the surreal, and the strange.

Unstuck

In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young's sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Daffy Duck enters the Valley of the Eternals. Faulkner and bell-bottoms cling to beauty's evanescence. Even in single poems, Young's tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea takes precedence over another, and their simultaneity is frequently revealed; sadness may throw a squirrelly shadow, joy can find itself dressed in mourning black. As in the agitated "Whirlpool Suite": "Pain / and pleasure are two signals carried / over one phoneline." In taking up subjects as slight as the examination of a signature or a true/false test, and as pressing as the death of friends, Young's poems embrace the duplicity of feeling, the malleability of perception, and the truth telling of wordplay.

Melena Ryzik

For more than 75 years Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead have been one of America's favorite couples. Through war and peace, through boom and bust, through sexual revolution and social upheaval, Blondie has become the most widely read comic strip in syndication-in 35 languages and in 47 countries. Blondie?the comic strip?was born on September 8, 1930. Dagwood was the rich, but awkward, son of millionaire industrialist J. Bolling Bumstead, while Blondie was a poor and beautiful nobody. Dagwood's parents were opposed to the marriage, but love won out, even though Dagwood had to give up his inheritance to marry Blondie in February, 1933. Over the years, the particulars of the Blondie comic strip have changed. Traveling salesmen have been replaced by telephone salesmen. Dagwood no longer takes the bus to work. He now rides in a car pool. But the themes have remained the same?eating, sleeping, making a living and raising children, all tied together by Blondie and Dagwood's undying devotion to each other. It's all here in this definitive book: The lives of Blondie and Dagwood and their interactions with their children Alexander and Cookie, their neighbors Herb and Tootsie Woodley, the family dog Daisy, Dagwood's boss Mr. Dithers, the mailman Mr. Beasley, and the neighborhood kid Elmo Tuttle. Included are Blondie and Dagwood's courtship, their early beaus, their wedding, Dagwood at work, Blondie's catering business, the cartoonist's favorite strips, and the story of Chic and Dean Young, the creators of Blondie.

Dean Young

Books

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