What do you think?
Rate this book
Divided Highway
poetry
33 pages, chapbook
First published January 1, 2008
1 person is currently reading
10 people want to read
About the author
Kim Young
2 books2 followersKim Young teaches creative writing and composition at Moorpark College and edits Chaparral, an online journal featuring poetry from Southern California. Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, MiPOesias, Pebble Lake Review, and other journals. She holds an MA from California State University Northridge and an MFA from Bennington College, where she received a Jane Kenyon Scholarship in poetry. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 9, 2008
All I can say is that half way through this chapbook I realized that I had ear-marked every single poem. I left the rest of the pages in this amazing chap unfolded because, as I knew it would turn out, I loved the rest of the book as much as I loved the earlier parts.
ah-maz-ing.
"I am the story women warn / their daughters of." - Kim Young, Apollo Curses Sibyl with Eternal Life
ah-maz-ing.
"I am the story women warn / their daughters of." - Kim Young, Apollo Curses Sibyl with Eternal Life
November 30, 2008
Static and Fugitive Tunes
Few poets who focus on the fragments of life that disappoint can maintain the reader’s’ interest: a respite now and then from the bumpy road of times and places and people and events helps the momentum of such a collection. Not so with Kim Young, a poet with a manner of depicting the gruesome, the bitterly ugly, the broken promises in an offhand way that comes across as one witnessing realities and confronting memories she wishes were different. In WHAT WE LEARN AT VALLEY HIGH she recalls her school years:
The P.E. coaches teach us about sex:
They corner me if a top is unzipped,
they watch me spray Aqua Net into my bangs.
We can always jump for them,
or hit the loading dock fences
and ditch sixth period for burgers and bong loads.
Kurt Cobain isn’t dead yet but
we light fires for him during Spanish class.
We’re learning which little deaths come next:
we’re doing whip-its in a truck before first period;
Rebecca is puking in the F building toilet – her dad in jail
for molesting her best-friend; there’s a fight on the quad;
I’m holding onto my boyfriend’s wallet chain.
I’m walking into a kegger in Box Canyon:
Manson’s cave, with an Indian face carved in sandstone,
looks down at us. I’m stepping out of a green Chevelle
zipping up my pants. Phil is jumping off a roof after selling
bathtub speed to twelve-year olds. I can’t see.
Ten guys beat a man who cornered
two girls in a vacant house next door. They piss on him afterwards.
They make his right eye blind. When we come home,
Lisa’s mom is catching rain from her leaky roof into cookie sheets.
Is he dead? she asks. Each of us fall onto a couch.
There’s the sound of drops hitting metal.
Kim Young sketches her brittle poems not with a calligrapher’s brush, but with the sharper, piercing and scratching etcher’s needle. To appreciate the depth of her messages requires several readings of each beautifully crafted poem: at first glimpse her thoughts wound to the reader’s eye disturbed, regretful, disappointed, angry, but sitting quietly for several readings the poems open to reveal a woman caught in the dilemma of life – questioning, reporting, resolving issues until she controls the experiences. In YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME:
Here are three wandering vagrants:
myself, my sister, my father –
connected by heart-rate, sweat, brainstem.
Our plane rocks and my abdomen
opens to a history of blows. My dad cracks
a beer and my mind speaks and speaks,
but only to myself. I unclick the belt
to cry in the small plastic bathroom.
I have had to make meaning out of this
family. No one is at home in a body
that remembers and kicks back.
Some great nerve that connects cranium
to abdomen. The heaviness of memory,
repeated blows after blows have stopped.
The three of us sit quietly like panhandlers
in a row. We beg to be full.
Much of Kim Young’s poetry reflects the blaring, at times smoggy California sun, light which, being nebulous at times, further enhances Young’s vision/version of the past. She is unafraid to share the darker side of family, friends, places and events, yet never allows the content to overflow the borders of confinement. In ADDICTION she takes us into the core of the problem:
It starts with a sugared gruel, a colostrum –
for your aching pores. You want to know
what everyone is laughing about.
You’re all salmon on the inside.
You get addicted to the act
of saving yourself. First
the saliva. Then each hair
in each follicle. A fix.
The shakes. A brightness.
A clicking in your ear.
You’ve been pegged
all along. Your hands
are where you can see em.
They’re searching your face,
your plate numbers,
your glove-box.
You’re addicted
to that straight stare
into the distance.
Perhaps Kim Young’s brutal honesty is what attracts us to her poetry, as though she is giving witness to the dark interstices we all shadow. It is a gift she has mastered…and we can wait for her brighter visions, obviously to come later! Meanwhile, life goes on, and Kim Young keeps us grounded. DIVIDED HIGHWAY deserves multiple readings.
Few poets who focus on the fragments of life that disappoint can maintain the reader’s’ interest: a respite now and then from the bumpy road of times and places and people and events helps the momentum of such a collection. Not so with Kim Young, a poet with a manner of depicting the gruesome, the bitterly ugly, the broken promises in an offhand way that comes across as one witnessing realities and confronting memories she wishes were different. In WHAT WE LEARN AT VALLEY HIGH she recalls her school years:
The P.E. coaches teach us about sex:
They corner me if a top is unzipped,
they watch me spray Aqua Net into my bangs.
We can always jump for them,
or hit the loading dock fences
and ditch sixth period for burgers and bong loads.
Kurt Cobain isn’t dead yet but
we light fires for him during Spanish class.
We’re learning which little deaths come next:
we’re doing whip-its in a truck before first period;
Rebecca is puking in the F building toilet – her dad in jail
for molesting her best-friend; there’s a fight on the quad;
I’m holding onto my boyfriend’s wallet chain.
I’m walking into a kegger in Box Canyon:
Manson’s cave, with an Indian face carved in sandstone,
looks down at us. I’m stepping out of a green Chevelle
zipping up my pants. Phil is jumping off a roof after selling
bathtub speed to twelve-year olds. I can’t see.
Ten guys beat a man who cornered
two girls in a vacant house next door. They piss on him afterwards.
They make his right eye blind. When we come home,
Lisa’s mom is catching rain from her leaky roof into cookie sheets.
Is he dead? she asks. Each of us fall onto a couch.
There’s the sound of drops hitting metal.
Kim Young sketches her brittle poems not with a calligrapher’s brush, but with the sharper, piercing and scratching etcher’s needle. To appreciate the depth of her messages requires several readings of each beautifully crafted poem: at first glimpse her thoughts wound to the reader’s eye disturbed, regretful, disappointed, angry, but sitting quietly for several readings the poems open to reveal a woman caught in the dilemma of life – questioning, reporting, resolving issues until she controls the experiences. In YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME:
Here are three wandering vagrants:
myself, my sister, my father –
connected by heart-rate, sweat, brainstem.
Our plane rocks and my abdomen
opens to a history of blows. My dad cracks
a beer and my mind speaks and speaks,
but only to myself. I unclick the belt
to cry in the small plastic bathroom.
I have had to make meaning out of this
family. No one is at home in a body
that remembers and kicks back.
Some great nerve that connects cranium
to abdomen. The heaviness of memory,
repeated blows after blows have stopped.
The three of us sit quietly like panhandlers
in a row. We beg to be full.
Much of Kim Young’s poetry reflects the blaring, at times smoggy California sun, light which, being nebulous at times, further enhances Young’s vision/version of the past. She is unafraid to share the darker side of family, friends, places and events, yet never allows the content to overflow the borders of confinement. In ADDICTION she takes us into the core of the problem:
It starts with a sugared gruel, a colostrum –
for your aching pores. You want to know
what everyone is laughing about.
You’re all salmon on the inside.
You get addicted to the act
of saving yourself. First
the saliva. Then each hair
in each follicle. A fix.
The shakes. A brightness.
A clicking in your ear.
You’ve been pegged
all along. Your hands
are where you can see em.
They’re searching your face,
your plate numbers,
your glove-box.
You’re addicted
to that straight stare
into the distance.
Perhaps Kim Young’s brutal honesty is what attracts us to her poetry, as though she is giving witness to the dark interstices we all shadow. It is a gift she has mastered…and we can wait for her brighter visions, obviously to come later! Meanwhile, life goes on, and Kim Young keeps us grounded. DIVIDED HIGHWAY deserves multiple readings.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews