Pleasure
With subtlety and a big heart, Gary Young swims through a subject that is seldom written about with the same care and attention to detail as the themes of death and pain — pleasure.
In No Other Life, Young examined the scary, unstoppable forces from which we seek shelter. In Pleasure, he doesn’t ignore them, but rather turns his gaze on those moments of huddled comfort, finding joy in his children’s raw honesty and in the sensuality of food, flowers, and everyday life. There he finds that pleasure is not transient, evanescent, and peripheral but, in fact, enduring and necessary.
As approachable as it is masterful, Pleasure is itself a reason to smile. Published by Heyday Books in 2006.
“Gary Young’s prose poems are luminous miniatures, alert
to every tremor of spirit that informs daily life. Quietly, simply and brilliantly, they bring us into the presence of ordinary miracles. Pleasure is a book I savored, and wanted never
to end.”
kim addonizio
No Other Life
Published by Heyday Books in 2005,
No Other Life gathers in a single volume three earlier books by Gary Young: Days; Braver Deeds;
and If He Had. It was the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s prestigious William Carlos Williams Award
in 2003.
“Gary Young has honed a sinuous, brief prose-poem form
that carries a flavor uniquely its own — unflinching, stringent in beauty, austerely moving.”
jane hirshfield
“Gary Young’s project in Braver Deeds is to ask
unsentimentally what a body’s terms are, how much it can take. His answers are the more affecting for how formal he has had to make them. Loosen just a hair, his poems imply, and it won’t seem worth it to go on.”
james mcmichael
“Transparent and refreshing, vital like the stream that flows
through the ‘insulating mist’ of his canyon. Gary Young’s beautiful Days flow on in elegant simplicity. This is a book Bashō would admire.”
sam hamill
Braver Deeds
Winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize, Braver Deeds is a harrowing exploration of violence in all its permutations. Rigorous and unflinching, Young takes his readers through the labyrinth of a harrowing domestic landscape that shares equivalence with war and the cruelest battlefield. “It is here,” writes Ethan Paquin in Quarterly West, “where adversaries stubbornly dig in, losses are heavily borne upon the soul, and reconciliation is often the most painful maneuver of all.”
“These sixty-two minimalist, prose-like poems, etched by the
artisan’s lapidary hand and burnished by the fateful elements, display the full character of Gary Young’s gift: the unflinching candor, the breath-taking sleights-of-hand, the physical and spiritual suffering that serve as a flame to the moth of his consciousness. Like a modern-day realist’s morality tales, these poems are backed by a moral purpose as compelling and dramatic as it is instructive and wise. This is a book one must wrestle with as well as read.”
sherod santos
Days
The poems in Gary Young’s Days seem to have been created by distilling a passionate utterance to its barest essentials. Each of these brief, lyrical prose poems suggests great vistas, essential dramas and immense distances. The animating principle of these poems must surely be multum in parvo, for there is much to enjoy in these dense miniatures.
“I was struck by the wisdom of this work, a quiet wisdom
that inheres in images so fully imagined that one can never forget them. The language has been so thoroughly purified that truth becomes, in the telling, austerely beautiful. Days is one of those rare books that I will keep beside my bed table for years to come.”
jay parini
The Dream
of a Moral Life
In his second book Gary Young speaks in the confidential tones of someone alone with language, unconcerned with the figure he cuts
in the reader’s eyes and intent instead on bringing to life, with clarity and grace, the labors and loves that tie him to the world. Whether about picking mushrooms, building
a chimney, facing up to pain, or planning a family, these sincere, unaffected poems emerge as labors of love in which work and imagination, grief and desire, body and soul are, for once, inseparable.
“There is an urgent, compelling intimacy in Gary Young’s long-
awaited second volume. These poems celebrate and stand as an interrogation of our daily, domestic faiths. Dense yet lyrical, this work seems carved of our most elemental pain and our most durable beliefs. We can feel every breath that’s drawn in this book becoming its own hard-won prayer. What more could we ask poetry to be?”
david st. john
Hands
Gary Young’s first collection mines the image of human hands for both their symbolic and quotidian significance. Like the hand that raises a curtain to illuminate a room in the book’s title poem, this collection celebrates the world and our joy at connecting with all that we find there.
“Young’s hands feel and ache and write. They caress: touching
a mother in distress, cupping a wife’s soft body, healing the dwarfed and the misshapen. Hands are a subtle image rendered with ease. Young eschews gimmickry for layered meanings. . . . Humans are seen vividly also, as if Young views the world around him without eyelids, or with a sharply focused telescopic lens. He is a gentle poet, of fine lyric gifts.
I found many clearings of the springs in Hands.”
robert peters
Northeast Rising Sun
“Mr. Young has seized upon the metaphor of hands as our
connection between the sense of physical and spiritual feeling. The variation achieved by this recurrent metaphor is a tribute to the poet’s dexterity as much as to his sensibilities. Young is a craftsman.”
don blankenship
Zeitgeist
Bear Flag Republic
California cannot lay claim to the prose poem, but this mercurial, subversive form has enjoyed a great flowering here. We have gathered the work of ninety poets, and added many essays that amplify
the history, process, definition and range of the poem in prose. We hoped
to uncover in the capacious prose poem form poems
that were infused with a sense of vitality, identity,
and soul-making.
— from the Introduction
Poems from ninety poets, including Killarney Clary, Wanda Coleman, Peter Everwine, Richard Garcia,
Amy Gerstler, Robert Hass, Eloise Klein Healy,
Jane Hirshfield, Garrett Hongo, Mark Jarman,
Dorianne Laux, Philip Levine, Larry Levis,
Morton Marcus, Czeslaw Milosz, Luis Omar Salinas, David St. John, Joseph Stroud, Amy Uyematsu,
Diane Wakoski, Charles Wright, and Al Young,
among many others.
Twenty-two essays from poets, including Robert Bly, Maxine Chernoff, Mark Jarman, Diane Wakoski,
Charles Harper Webb, and more.
“Speaking is natural; writing is not. Prose and poetry
will forever combine and re-combine to express
what utterly needs to be told.”
al young
“A prose poem has the shape of water; it spreads out.
Some poems are that expansive, that open and fluid,
and their shape needs to reflect their nature. . . .”
marsha de la o
The Geography
of Home:
California’s Poetry of Place
The Geography of Home brings together the works
of seventy-six important figures in contemporary California poetry,
including Philip Levine,
Peter Everwine, Mark Jarman, Adrienne Rich,
Dennis Schmitz, Carolyn Kizer, Gary Soto, Al Young,
Kim Addonizio, Charles Wright, Carol Muske,
David St. John, Larry Levis, Robert Hass, Gary Snyder, William Everson, Luis Omar Salinas, Diane Wakoski, Garrett Hongo, Jane Hirshfield, and Brenda Hillman. Through the multiple selections for each poet, we can witness connections to California, visions of the place poets have at one time or other called home. Additionally, the poets have written introductory statements expressly for this anthology that will speak to their history in California, and to the influence of the state on their poetry.
In this long-awaited collection, California’s unique
and complex geography is examined, questioned, and ultimately celebrated, through forms as varied, dynamic, and compelling as the state itself.
“The editors have done an excellent job creating a concise,
rich volume of poetry a reader can go to and explore a world seemingly without limits.”
aimé merizon
ForeWord Reviews
“A marvelously diverse pool of poets of many cultures
and writing styles. The audience for this collection is limitless.”
Today’s Librarian
“A groundbreaking anthology of California poetry.”
Santa Cruz Good Times
