Elegy On Toy Piano

About the Author, Back Cover

DEAN YOUNG is the author of five previous books of poems, Skid (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize; First Course in Turbulence (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999); Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Poetry Prize; Beloved Infidel (1992); and Design with X (1988). He has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and two from the National Endowment to the Arts. He teaches in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. program in creative writing and is a permanent faculty member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He divides his time between Iowa and Berkeley, California, where he lives with his wife, fiction writer Cornelia Nixon, and their cat, Keats. 93 poetry In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young’s sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Even within single poems, Young’s tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea takes precedence over another, and simultaneity is frequently revealed; sadness may throw a squirrelly shadow, joy can find itself dressed in mourning black. In taking up subjects as slight as the examination of a signature or a true/false test and as pressing as the death of friends, Young’s poems embrace the duplicity of feeling, the malleability of perception, and the truth telling of wordplay. Praise for Young’s previous books in the Pitt Poetry Series: Dean Young has published five previous collections, including Design with X, Beloved Infidel, Strike Anywhere, First Course in Turbulence, and, most recently, Skid, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and teaches at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. He lives in Iowa City and Berkeley, California. Pitt Poetry Series University of Pittsburgh Press www.upress.pitt.edu COVER DESIGN: CHIQUITA BABB COVER ART: DEAN YOUNG ISBN 10: 0-8229-5872-4 ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-5872-7 Skid “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.” —Publishers Weekly First Course in Turbulence “Dean Young’s fourth book is caffeinated, frantic. The speaker of these poems is highly attuned to the world, but utterly befuddled by it . . . . Theories, conversations, books, friends, mishaps, and other minutiae blend into each other . . . . The core struggle here is how one goes about assigning meaning to the arbitrary. Mythologies, once created, rush toward their inevitable collapse.” —Boston Book Review 9 7 8 0 8 2 2 9 5 8 7 2 7 ...