Elegy On Toy Piano

Confidently balances moments of absurdity against high drama and raw admissions of emotion. . . . His particular mix of the silly and the deadly serious increases the poignancy of the poems. . . . This book of energetic, chronic juxtaposition pieces together a winning, tinkling set of send-offs for friends, and for feelings.

Stretches beyond grief to portray a wide range of mixed emotions.

Dean Young's work, I've concluded, will delight only two kinds of people: those who generally read poetry and those who generally don't. The former will find a promising revitalization project and unalloyed pleasure. The latter will find, to their unalloyed pleasure, that perhaps poetry isn't how they imagined it. . . . Young is the architect of an amusement park, but he's also the mescaline-addled raconteur in the truth-teller's booth at that amusement park. He's both dreamscaper and landscaper, spinner of fantastic yarns and unremitting bullshit-detector. He's initiating protests with water guns. He's composing dirges on plastic accordions and elegies on toy pianos.

Young writes playfully and snappily like the best of the New York School of poets. . . . he welds pop culture and surrealism, referencing Marilyn Monroe as gleefully and easily as he does Breton. . . . Clever imp that he is, Young does clearly relish the absurd, the illogical, the profane and the ribald.

Young has found a world vibrantly alive at every turn—and he has shown us a way to live in this world, in this moment, in poetry.

I wanted to start by saying this is the best damn book I've ever read . . . he has such presence in his work; an articulate and eccentric voice, the train of thought ridden to the end of the line . . .there's something so uplifting about this work — both cerebral and generous, playful and angry. It engages you on a number of levels, making for an invigorating intellectual workout. . . . Liking Young's poetry is not a matter of taste. If you don't like it, you don't havey any. . . . A subversive triumph of the imagination.