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.
ISBN: 9781556597220
Format: Paperback
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.”—Boston Globe
“No matter how surreal the images Young conjures are, or how unexpected their associations, they are always rooted to an emotional truth, so that in his poetry we recognize both the scattered external world around us, and our equally discordant internal lives.”—Rain Taxi
“This book reads like a long, breathless thank-you for life’s seemingly random jumble of beauty, strangeness, tenderness and joy.”—Los Angeles Times
“Young has mastered his own style and way of thinking in poems. Only a rare poet can make a reader simultaneously cry and laugh this way.”—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.”—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