Böcker av Gary Young

American Analects uses the Analects of Confucius as an inspiration to mediate upon the life, death, and the subsequent loss of the poet's influential, beloved mentor-the painter Gene Holtan. These poems are juxtaposed with poems about other losses-of parents, of friends and friends of friends. Some of these deaths were caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, others by age and the inescapable journey we all take. Still, this is not a dour book. Many poems celebrate our ability to inspire, to comfort, and to nurture one another, and the collection is leavened with poems about family, about poetry, and about the healing influence of landscape and of nature. In the end, American Analects is about resiliency, about moving on from personal loss, from the pandemic, and from catastrophic fires, to rejoice in what remains. These poems encourage us to acknowledge the fragility of our lives and of those we love, while we celebrate those who guide us, even in memory.

Winner of the 2021 Blue Light Poetry PrizeGary Young's most recent books are That's What I Thought, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award from Persea Books, and Precious Mirror, translations from the Japanese. His books include Even So: New and Selected Poems; Pleasure; No Other Life, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Braver Deeds, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; The Dream of a Moral Life, which won the James D. Phelan Award; and Hands. He has received grants from the NEH, NEA, and the California Arts Council, among others. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz.ENDORSEMENTS"Since the 1970s, Young has been publishing almost unbelievably intimate and precise poems. . . Young writes with a unique combination of wisdom and terror, engendering a kind of sad calm, a hard-earned acceptance of life's difficulty and openness to its beauty."- Publishers Weekly"There's glow, wonder, in all his writing, even the poems of terrible pain, where wonder bathes the strangeness of the circumstances themselves, bathes the strength of spirit that allows those circumstances to be survived. . . He's become one of our most piercing, luminous prose poets."- Richard Silberg, Poetry Flash