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Creature Feature will thrill any Dean Young fan who has been waiting eagerly to hear more from this beloved poet.Creature Feature is Dean Young’s first posthumous collection since his death in 2022. More feisty, hilarious, surreal, and heart breaking than ever, Young and his tireless inventiveness are on full display. These poems resound with mischief, aching beauty, and brazen chance. Young remains committed to the generative possibilities of poetry even as he writes us his own elegy again and again.
Young envisioned
Creature Feature to serve as the third and final installment in a trilogy that includes
Shock by Shock (Copper Canyon, 2015) and
Solar Perplexus (Copper Canyon, 2019). Together, these three books, which cover the turbulent years following his successful heart-transplant surgery in 2011, demonstrate a vigorous recommitment to poetic recklessness and inventiveness, but also an awareness that time is short and art in our time is more urgent than ever.
About the author
Dean Young (1955-2022) was the author of seventeen books of poetry and poetic theory. His iconic, comedic style was derived from the New York School of Poetry and from contemporary art movements like Surrealism and Dadaism. In an interview with the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Young said, “For me the human drama, the squishy, time-limited pulse, is always at the center of the poem.” His book
Elegy on Toy Piano was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, and his work has been celebrated with the Academy Award in Literature and the Colorado Prize for Poetry. The former Texas Poet Laureate, Dean Young received multiple fellowships, including the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, the Stegner Fellowship, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
