Even So: New and Selected Poems

by Gary Young

"I was struck by the wisdom of this work, a quiet wisdom that inheres in images so fully imagined that one can never forget them. The language has been so thoroughly purified that truth becomes, in the telling, austerely beautiful."—Jay Parini "There's no word for what Young does, only for what he accomplishes—the capturing of small, daily miracles."—Dorianne Laux Gary Young is one of the country's best known prose poets and his unique, sinuous, brief style has a flavor all its own. This collection includes work selected from six previously published volumes and two unpublished sequences of new work. Gary Young lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Genres: Poetry

260 pages, Paperback

First published March 21, 2011

About the author

Gary Young is a poet, artist, printer, and educator. His numerous awards include recognition from the Poetry Society of America—the 2013 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award (2013), the Shelley Memorial Award (2009), the William Carlos Williams Award (2003), and the Lyric Poem Award (2001). Gary has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, and his print work is represented in the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Getty Center for the Arts, and special collection libraries throughout the country. He teaches Creative Writing, and is the Director of the Cowell Press at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Reviews

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a selected volume of Gary Young's work. I hadn't heard of him prior to this, though quite a bit of his work focuses on life near Santa Cruz, California, where I lived a few years of my life. While I enjoyed traveling back to that landscape, I didn't find myself moved beyond the "scenic" quality of the poems. Although he wrote lineated verse in the early part of his career, he quickly adopted short prose poetry as his mode and didn't deviate from it. The later work in this volume came across as travelogues. Pleasant descriptions but no more than that.

I'm emphasizing landscape more than I probably should. Many of his poems are about domestic relationships, whether with parents or with his own children. There is tragedy lurking behind some of the poems but there is always a sense of moving beyond it. The overall movement of the book is toward a happy life spent observing wonders in the everyday workings of nature.

[W.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was so happy to discover the prose poetry of Gary Young. It was something missing from my life about which I had no clue. In this New and Selected, the vast majority of it is prose poems and mostly very short ones. These are plain-spoken poems that build great art from simple language. I've been enjoying several books of prose poetry by Louis Jenkins (who died relatively recently) as well. I discovered the prose poems of Jenkins and Young for the first time n the same book. They are both well-represented in No Boundaries, the landmark anthology of prose poetry edited by Ray Gonzalez in 2003 (which I also heartily recommend).

[Donice C. Jenkins (DJ) · Rating 2 out of 5]

-- Read: October 4, 2025
-- Review:
- Nothing here is particularly bad or awful. Young clearly knows how to utilize poetic structure and has some experience with incorporating imagery; only when he does it, his poetry has the depth of an undergrad freshman or sophomore. Certainly not bad and has clear potential, but also nothing I'd publish as is.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, lucid, natural imagery in the beginning, thoughtful nightmares in the middle, and I have not yet finished.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

read a selection.