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Reviewed by:
  • Skid
  • Hadara Bar-Nadav (bio)
Dean Young , Skid, University of Pittsburgh Press

Dean Young's poetry at once invites, repels, and surprises. Amidst kaleidoscopic dizziness are brilliant moments of clarity, which gain impact against surface chaos. From a master of dark comedy, Skid is Young's [End Page 193] sardonic followup to First Course in Turbulence (1999); Strike Anywhere (1995); Beloved Infidel (1992); and Design with X (1988). The various subjects Young takes on in Skid include snowmen, God, poetry, capitalism, grief, isolation, and Republicans. Edgy, experimental, and surreal, Young breaks with these labels to arrive at stunningly simple truths.

In "My People" Young names cold facts of reality, but claims poetry as a space in which to be simultaneously smart, devious, and funny. In his stark vision of humanity, all people are culpable. He starts:

I too appeared between the legs
of a woman in considerable discomfort.
A rather gristly scene but fairly common
among my kind.

(13)

Young does not just blame motherhood, middle-class America, and yuppiedom for having ravaged the natural world: "we've managed to ruin the sky/just by going about our business,/I in my super XL, you in your Discoverer." Neither does he exclude himself or poets generally from responsibility for the deranged state of America.

In "Gaga Gala" Young displays a generous ability to laugh at himself and his art. He describes a reading at "the Institute of Haiku-Induced Orgasm" and the "Center for Useless Experimentation" in which the poets, misunderstood and alcohol-thirsty, create limited, faulty, artistic products. In fact, the poets undo themselves as seen in the final few lines of the poem in which Young uses science as a metaphor for his wry perceptions of poetry: "With the electron,/first they found it then/it proved not to be there."

Among Young's critique of America and art lie sudden startling and beautifully articulated emotional flashes. He often touches upon the apparent death of his father, a character like Toulouse Lautrec's shadowy male figure, who haunts the edges of his poems. In "We Through Mists Descry" Young repeats the refrain: "When my father died, I saw his spirit snagged in a tree." The image of a dead father thereby resonates throughout the poem as Young describes people smoking cigarettes and buying watermelon and surge protectors, actions that seem less about Young's playful tendency for poetic Americana clutter and more about the way the poet and people generally cope with grief and death, obsessing over the minute details and protecting themselves from feeling too much. Typical in his work in which the fragmented bubbling surface noise contrasts a poignant realization, a realization that conversely could easily pass for rock lyrics, Young writes: "I'd like to be completely free but I want everything/to belong to me."

Often Young's striking realizations are encased in a kind of post-modern chaos, leaving the reader unsure if he is simply observing, critiquing, or making fun of his subjects. Consequently, he may be doing all [End Page 194] three, and playing off the resonant tensions the reader is left to sort out. In "Changing Your Bulb" he writes:

I feel like I'm approaching a cliff wrapped
in an enormous kite, cheery as life insurance
and I can't be sure if the statuary
is of rich citizens or supernatural forces.
Finite is our sadness upon this earth she-bop.

Young concludes the poem: "There is a part/of the spirit that cannot be destroyed." This example is indicative of much of Young's work, a sad and sarcastic wisdom marked by the fragmented nature of the experimental or surreal.

When Young writes: "The most vibrant forms are emergent forms" he may as well be talking about his own poetry. As often as it is painful, it is playful and smart. The scattered rush and push of ideas, the energetic narration, and the complex array of visceral images are complemented by moments of stark clarity. Incongruously realistic and surreal, frightening and funny, simple and complex, Dean Young's Skid shocks us with portraits of our everyday lives.

Hadara Bar-Nadav

Hadara Bar-Nadav is a Ph...

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