Reading Dean Young's poetry is probably the most paradox-like experience I've ever had in my life. His poetry is surreal - made up of many concrete images that can be so bizarre to visualize. The strange thing here is that nevertheless, these wild images are accompanied by a feeling that the poet knows you. To me, he really knows how to put into words those fleeting feelings that are very much present though we may not know fully how to describe them. His daring images capture those sensations we can't quite, and in just a perfect way that even though you may be reading the most bizarre poem you've read in your life, something resonates with you because you know he put into words a feeling you haven't figured out how to describe yet. His poetry is also filled with humor and wit and this is just a fantastic collection overall. ( )

Poetry paints nothing but it splashes
color, flushed, swooning, echolating
and often associated with flight
as in Keats's viewless wings of Poesy,
a weird statement. The wings can't see?
Are invisible like Wonder Woman's plane?
Poetry is a good provider of the strange.

(From the poem Non-Apologia)

In his Fall Higher collection of poems Dean Young once again is a good provider of the strange. He's often referred to as "one of our most inventive poets", and that's what I like best about him - his ability to make us look at the world with a fresh eye, and often laugh at it, through his sometimes stream of consciousness connections and laser-true commentary. In this one he seems more bilious than in previous collections; those feeling chirpily sanguine (phrase cribbed from Richard) may find themselves more morose and disgruntled after reading this one.

In this poem, titled Undertow, he has the sea thinking about itself with a "sudden out-loud laughter snort":

Oh, what the
hell, I probably drove myself crazy
thinks the sea, kissing all those strangers,
forgiving them no matter what, liars
in confession, vomiters of plastics
and fossil fuels but what a stricken
elixir I've become even to my becalmed depths,
while through its head swim a million
fishes seemingly made of light
eating each other.

He knows he can be hard to follow. At one point he says, "Try to stay with me, okay?" (Wolf Lying in Snow). And he can be silly. "I like napkins folded into swans/ because I like wiping my mouth on swans." (Commencement Address). He can be romantic:

because of you I'm talking to crickets, clouds,
confiding in a cat. Everyone says
Come to your senses, and I do, of you.
Every touch electric, every taste you,
every smell, even burning sugar, every
cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples
at the farmer's market, every melon,
plum, I come undone, undone.

(Delphiniums in a Window Box).

And for me he can be profound. After wondering over our fallacies in some detail, he concludes:

We have absolutely no proof
god isn't an insect
rubbing her hind legs together to sing.
Or boring into us like a yellow jacket
into a fallen, overripe pear.
Or an assassin bug squatting over us,
shoving a proboscis right through
our breastplate then sipping.
How wonderful our poisons don't kill her.

(Selected Recent and New Errors). Yikes! That makes it hard to be chirpily sanguine, but it sure snaps the eyes open. ( )