Design with X

by Dean Young

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Dean Young is the author of many collections of poetry, including Shock by Shock, Bender: New and Selected Poems, and Elegy on a Toy Piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.

Reviews

[Daniel Gengenbach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible use of language and prose, Dean Young knows how to entangle the reader is a series of words that one would never put together. Absolutely beautiful, left me breathless multiple times.

[Krzysztof · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading Dean Young's first book is what I imagine it would be like to look at, say, Picasso's early paintings where he was proficiently replicating the masters. You read the next book, you move farther into the gallery. Sharper angles begin to appear. The muted colors become more vibrant. Symmetry is abandoned.

Now he's no longer beholden to his predecessors. He's learned the rules and feels he can break them. He no longer has to paint with the words expected of him. He listens to Paul Simon talk about eschewing the word LOVE in his later songs and he decides there's no need to bring GOD into this. His nursing studies now inform more than just his terminology; now he actually administers to the sick, to the dying, to the wounded with aerological associations.

But, as Young says in "The Orphanage", "It's no simple search for what was / back before we started feeling like relics / of our own lives". Thankfully, it didn't take Young very long.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

His first book, published when he was 33, has an eighties flair. When I say that I mean the poems are shaped like eighties poems, and they use techniques from the eighties, such as transitioning mid-poem with the use of "Once," or "I remember." How prophetic the second poem in the collection about the friend having her heart fixed--since Young just had a heart transplant. Was the poem really about a friend? A lot of these are. Here are a few of my favorite moments:

"I grew into my growing into coat."

"You've got to act like everything will kill you."

"The exhaustion of being disapproved of"

"Imagine the speed of pain
reached and receding like notes on the clarinet."

[William Stobb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned that poetry could be smart in science-y ways while also sounding like regular sh*t people say. I like all of Dean Young's books. This was just the first one I read. Recently, Dean Young wrote a blurb for the cover of my book. That was like a dream come true, like time had gone in a spiral and changed me over into a different person who I should like better, but who was really mainly the same.

[cindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

it's funny to see the difference between then and now

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful, physical, visceral. These are poems of dissection and intimate mourning. I don't know how he explains so much so simply.

[Bryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very striking imagery, some of it very much related to the fact the writer is a nurse. I always like to see a bit of science in my poetry.