That’s What I Thought
Winner of the 2017 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award
That’s What I Thought was published by Persea Books in 2018, and can be purchased through: Persea Books // Amazon // Barnes & Noble
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. The koan holds true for the truths that emerge again and again in Gary Young’s clear-eyed, luminous prose poems. Their language stands alongside of the reality they represent, the way a koan stands alongside of its meaning, until one cannot tell the two apart. Poetry and experience become a single thing. The warmth and honesty of Young’s poems are as durable as their precision and insight.
Mark Jarman
Precious Mirror
Precious Mirror was published by White Pine Press in 2018, and can be purchased through: Amazon // Bookshop
Kobun Chino has been gone fifteen years, but what vitality remains in his brushwork! Which is to say he was a dragon-master of Zen’s ability to reach “beyond words.” Gesture, ink, space, light, laughter; dry brush, wet brush, sadness, form, emptiness! His calligraphy is so direct it whisks past language. And yet most North Americans can’t read the words that hold all that spirit. So Gary Young uses syntax, line break, rhythm, type font, and American words to create poems that reflect Kobun’s own ink-strokes. If someone asks, what is Zen—give them this book.
Andrew Schelling
Even So
Even So was published by White Pine Press in 2012 and can be purchased through: Amazon // Alibris
At a time when cynicism is a default condition and T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” has proven to be an accurate diagnosis of the age, Young’s persistent delight in everyday experience seems downright radical, a perverse valentine to life that is honest, sincere, and never naïve.
Tony Leuzzi
Pleasure
Pleasure was published by Heyday Books in 2006 and can be purchased through: the author // Amazon
Gary Young’s prose poems are luminous miniatures, alert to every tremor of spirit that informs daily life. Quietly, simply and brilliantly, they bring us into the presence of ordinary miracles. Pleasure is a book I savored, and wanted never to end.
Kim Addonizio
No Other Life
Winner of the 2003 William Carlos Williams Award given by the Poetry Society of America
No Other Life was published by Heyday Books in 2005 and can be purchased through: the author // Amazon // AbeBooks
There’s no word for what Young does, only for what he accomplishes—the capturing of small, daily miracles.
Dorianne Laux
Braver Deeds
Winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize
Braver Deeds was published by Gibbs Smith in 1999 and can be purchased through: the author // Amazon
Gary Young has honed a sinuous, brief prose-poem form that carries a flavor uniquely its own—unflinching, stringent in beauty, austerely moving. These are poems that swerve, surprise, and still see and feel with one-pointed clarity; taken together, they create a volume both subtle and powerful.
Jane Hirshfield
Days
Days was published by Silverfish Review Press in 1997 and can be purchased through: the author
Transparent and refreshing, vital like the stream that flows through the ‘insulating mist’ of his canyon, Gary Young’s beautiful Days flow on in elegant simplicity. This is a book Bashō would admire.
Sam Hamill
The Dream of a Moral Life
Winner of the James D. Phelan Award
The Dream of a Moral Life was published by Copper Beech Press in 1990 and can be purchased through: the author // Small Press Distribution
There is an urgent, compelling intimacy in Gary Young’s long-awaited second volume. These poems celebrate and stand as an interrogation of our daily, domestic faiths. Dense yet lyrical, this work seems carved of our most elemental pain and our most durable beliefs. We can feel every breath that’s drawn in this book becoming its own hard-won prayer. What more could we ask poetry to be?
David St. John
Hands
Hands was published by Illuminati in 1979 and can be purchased through: the author // Amazon
Young’s hands feel and ache and write. They caress: touching a mother in distress, cupping a wife’s soft body, healing the dwarfed and the misshapen. Hands are a subtle image rendered with ease. Young eschews gimmickry for layered meanings. . . . Humans are seen vividly also, as if Young views the world around him without eyelids, or with a sharply focused telescopic lens. He is a gentle poet, of fine lyric gifts. I found many clearings of the springs in Hands.
Robert Peters