cover image Shock by Shock

Shock by Shock

Dean Young. Copper Canyon (Consortium, dist.), $23 (120p) ISBN 978-1-55659-431-1

In his first collection of all-new work written after his 2011 heart transplant, Young (Bender) appears at his most mordant, and most mortal. “The wolf appointed to tear me apart/ is sure making slow work of it,” he writes to open the book, and in the poems that follow, Young retains his considerable charms: a generous, tragicomic spirit, a guileless love of rhyme, and an acrobatic sense of logic and image. In “Crash Test Dummies of an Imperfect God,” the eponymous subjects rapidly transform from “dumpster” to “snow cone” to “genital-faced bivalve.” But these poems, which invite readers into the quotidian aspects of the poet’s life and reflect on his career, are also unusually meditative for Young, who is better known for pyrotechnics. “I’m ready for my close-up./ I’m ready for my far-away,” he writes in “Ghost Gust,” one of several poems that figure his post-op survival as a kind of afterlife. Not all of the poems hit their mark (indeed, one likens poets to “blind knife throwers”), and the collection hardly represents a major stylistic shift, but its twilit tenor does give it an extra heft. Even with a borrowed heart, Young has a remarkable capacity to remind us of the ticking of our own. [em](Sept.) [/em]