First Course In Turbulence

About, the Author, Back Cover

Dean Young was born in 1955 in Columbia, Pennsylvania. He has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a Stegner from Stanford, and two from the National Endowment for the Arts. His three previous books of poems are Design with X, Beloved Infidel, and Strike Anywhere , which won the Colorado Poetry Prize in 1995. Currently an associate professor at Loyola University , he splits his time between Chicago and Berkeley, California, where he lives with his wife, fiction writer Cornelia Nixon, and his cat, Minnow. Photo by P. James Fotos PITT POETRY SERIES “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 With rapid shifts between subject and tone, sometimes within single poems, Dean Young’s latest book explores the kaleidoscopic welter of art and life. Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes the joke. With surrealist volatility, these poems are the result of experiments that continue for the reader during each reading. Young moves from reworkings of creation myths, the index of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, pseudo reports and memos, collaged biographies, talking clouds, and worms, to memory, mourning, sexual playfulness, and deep sadness in the course of this turbulent book. Dean Young was born in 1955 in Columbia, Pennsylvania. He has received a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a Stegner fellowship from Stanford, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has published three previous books of poems, Design with X, Beloved Infidel , and Strike Anywhere, which won the Colorado Poetry Prize in 1995. Currently an associate professor at Loyola University , he splits his time between Chicago and Berkeley, California, where he lives with his wife, fiction writer Cornelia Nixon. University of Pittsburgh Press Pittsburgh, Pa. 15261 COVER ART: DEAN YOUNG COVER DESIGN: CHIQUITA BABB ISBN 0-8229-5697-7 ,!7IA8C2-jfgjhg! Photo by P. James Fotos ...