Böcker av Dean Young

To read Dean Young's Elegy for the Last Male Northern White Rhino is to know that "One idea is a door can be opened / by pressing your forehead against / a sheet of paper." Meanwhile he is passing through the entryway carrying reams. In this new chapbook he is at work, stacking the broken rowboats as he suggests that there is always one more dimension. He has spent years "in a steel cage counting syllables." Come now. Count with him.

After more than 12 years, Dean Young's second book of poetry, Beloved Infidel, is back in print.

In The Art of Recklessness, Dean Young's sprawling and subversive first book of prose on poetry, imagination swerves into primitivism and surrealism and finally toward empathy. How can recklessness guide the poet, the artist, and the reader into art, and how can it excite in us a sort of wild receptivity, beyond craft? "Poetry is not a discipline," Young writes. "It is a hunger, a revolt, a drive, a mash note, a fright, a tantrum, a grief, a hoax, a debacle, an application, an affect . . ."