Review by Booklist Review
There are now so many things and ideas in the world that it addles even the best-intentioned mind. Young is sane enough, a liberal who concludes "Republican Victory," which consists of thoughts that "are but junk mail.../to the people of the future," with the fear that "they'll never forgive us." You could question his sensibilities, but not his capabilities. Elsewhere, however, it is a different story. In "Today's Visibility," a museum-hopping excursion becomes impossible because the exhibits are too delicate to be observed; seeing them is only the first in a series of unrealizable experiences in a day that outraces the poet's trajectory through it. If there is so much stuff that can't be seen, there are also so many ideas about any one thing that no single idea can be preferred; thus in "Blue Garden," what "a poem should be" becomes a serial bait-and-switch game until the poet, concluding, huffs, "The truest endings are abrupt." Surrealism seldom seems as much like real life as in Young's hilarious and cautionary poems. --Ray Olson
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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." (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
