Description:
The heartachingly searching, irreverently wisecracking, and stubbornly uncompromising poems that walked a formal tightwire just before Young's death in 2022.
Creature Feature is Dean Young's first posthumous collection since his death in 2022. More feisty, hilarious, surreal, and heartbreaking than ever, Young and his tireless inventiveness are on full display in fierce poems that refuse to compromise yet are guided by love and amazement at living. These poems resound with risk-taking, mischief, and aching beauty. Young remains committed to the generative possibilities of poetry even as he writes his own elegy again and again.
Young envisioned Creature Feature to serve as the third and final installment in a trilogy that includes Shock by Shock (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and Solar Perplexus (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). Together, these three books were imagined during the turbulent years following his successful heart-transplant surgery, and they demonstrate a vigorous recommitment to artistic recklessness and poetic inventiveness. Through all their painful genius, these poems reveal an abiding awareness that time is short and art in our time is more urgent than ever.
Review Quotes:
Praise for Creature Feature
"In Young's poems every new line bounds out of the brush, gazelle-like, with a reckless leap. The absurdity of his juxtapositions and the wildness of his enjambments can be funny, in a 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' sort of way, but . . . the randomness could suddenly yield to deep expressions of love and hurt."--Jeff Gordinier, New York Times
"Young, whose appealingly surreal poetry anticipated and echoed the more disorienting zigzags of internet culture, died in his 60s in 2022; this collection applies his characteristically giddy sense of unraveling to his own life and ill health, in work that seems fully aware of being pre-posthumous."--New York Times, Editor's Choice
Praise for Dean Young
"Young has always stood out for his sharp humor, boundless poetic energy, and sheer readability. If adventurous poetry can sometimes feel like a tenuous tightrope walk, Young's poems feel more like zip lines."--The Boston Globe
"This book reads like a long, breathless thank-you for life's seemingly random jumble of beauty, strangeness, tenderness and joy."--Los Angeles Times
"With a transformed attention to life's shifts and minutiae, Young's signature unmoored poetics style is filled with quick shifts and leaps as he examines life's surreal moments and unexpected humor."--Publishers Weekly
"Young's amiable Dadaism kindly and gently shows us the desperation and oblivion visible in good poetry. For all his comedic effects, there's some serious work being done here. Young's work withstands and encourages such serious treatment."--Boston Review
"Mr. Young knows that to be truly reverent, the poet needs to be irreverent...But for all his humor and linguistic jazz, Mr. Young doesn't shun the big questions."--The New York Times
"The poems always seem to be flying away--from easy sense making, from themselves, from us. It's almost as if they are birds. And, as birds, most of them soar well above the seed-pecked fields of contemporary poetry."--Coldfront
"The language, the invention, the imagination, and the sheer fun of his poems are astounding."--Charles Simic
"Dean Young's exhilarating, complex, and wide-ranging poems give one the impression of conversations with an angel in which the poet has to be super-alert at every second, for every second counts and the angel knows everything. To listen to these conversations is to experience a colloquial, witty, emotional, and urgent discourse not to be found anywhere else."--Kenneth Koch
"Dean Young's poems are as entertaining as a three-ring circus and as imaginative as a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch. He is one of the most inventive and satisfying poets writing today."--American Academy of Arts and Letters