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Telling the Future Off
Poetry. Stephanie Young's long awaited debut, TELLING THE FUTURE OFF, ensnares the reader in a loop of theatrical-sets, filtered through the obsessive-compulsive call and response of self-help tag-lines. It's 3:30 at the office and the landscape is all twisted up in the bedsheets, littered with car radios, eyeshadow and circuit training. In the distance, the internet drones. TELLING THE FUTURE OFF is built of the poetry of Today, of realism colliding with the dream-state. In it, Young questions and she answers but never does she waver. When she asks, "Am I tough enough?" the unanimous answer is Yes.
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
First published September 8, 2005
24 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 27, 2015
Her poems are sometimes like stumbling into a conversation that hovers in the air over your head. But each poem sticks and opens your awareness of words and how fragmented our thoughts are, how there is a need for this to be captured. Worth a read for lovers of poetry who admire the modern woman.
February 27, 2008
“More and more we are evacuated.
Lifting weights is good for the body.” (23)
Stephanie Young’s first book of poems, Telling The Future Off, sounds the “simple chord progression” of a gendered nation, where manuals and information speak to us. In “Day In The Life Of I: The Day My Arches Fell,” the speaker of the poem says “I’ll have/what she’s having. Pink highlights along the nose/and brows, agency of pink,/pink when next to red, flesh covered/key in her place on the keychain.” Here, we are in the midst of a mental agency that seeks corporate aisles and advertisement for decision making. As in most of the poems, the speaker taps into America’s collective consciousness, and points her anti-lyric “I” into the void of that “self-evidently false doctrine.” It’s not for nothing that she says: “I mean for you to take/this interrogation seriously.”
Young’s poems work up their public interrogation by drawing on the list of American pitfalls in a manner both sardonic and authoritative, while rubbing the reader with a harsh humor. Poem after poem, whose titles query, declare, and muse on the dilemma of personal preservation, social conduct, ethical responsibility, and spiritual matters, try to respond to the “falsified appearance” of our current socio-political nation, without disparaging. These issues are much a collective problem as they are a problem that the manufactured and gendered individual must confront that “beneath/every desire is another desire to drink from the spigot directly.”
“Facial surgery, the fast internal music
propelling us through and out
the back of the newsvan.” (87)
The speaker of these poems’s reliance on the declarative statement, conjures through a variety of poetic forms such as prose and the finely modulated couplets, a kind of public questioning that employs the rhetoric of consumerism which acts to subvert and interrogate our historical context. While the speaker’s view always appears limited by such dramatic questions as “Did I think/I was too busy for the war,” the point of view of the poems is always highly cognizant of its position in the social landscape. We learn from the poem “Upper Moderation,” that “if you’re not the logo,/you’re the logo marker.”
“Some things are happening everywhere
but the supply chain is insufficient
and medicine takes months
to reach the hinterland.” (100)
“For until one is commodified,
there is heroin, the champagne to draw back,
always incorporation.” (101)
Lifting weights is good for the body.” (23)
Stephanie Young’s first book of poems, Telling The Future Off, sounds the “simple chord progression” of a gendered nation, where manuals and information speak to us. In “Day In The Life Of I: The Day My Arches Fell,” the speaker of the poem says “I’ll have/what she’s having. Pink highlights along the nose/and brows, agency of pink,/pink when next to red, flesh covered/key in her place on the keychain.” Here, we are in the midst of a mental agency that seeks corporate aisles and advertisement for decision making. As in most of the poems, the speaker taps into America’s collective consciousness, and points her anti-lyric “I” into the void of that “self-evidently false doctrine.” It’s not for nothing that she says: “I mean for you to take/this interrogation seriously.”
Young’s poems work up their public interrogation by drawing on the list of American pitfalls in a manner both sardonic and authoritative, while rubbing the reader with a harsh humor. Poem after poem, whose titles query, declare, and muse on the dilemma of personal preservation, social conduct, ethical responsibility, and spiritual matters, try to respond to the “falsified appearance” of our current socio-political nation, without disparaging. These issues are much a collective problem as they are a problem that the manufactured and gendered individual must confront that “beneath/every desire is another desire to drink from the spigot directly.”
“Facial surgery, the fast internal music
propelling us through and out
the back of the newsvan.” (87)
The speaker of these poems’s reliance on the declarative statement, conjures through a variety of poetic forms such as prose and the finely modulated couplets, a kind of public questioning that employs the rhetoric of consumerism which acts to subvert and interrogate our historical context. While the speaker’s view always appears limited by such dramatic questions as “Did I think/I was too busy for the war,” the point of view of the poems is always highly cognizant of its position in the social landscape. We learn from the poem “Upper Moderation,” that “if you’re not the logo,/you’re the logo marker.”
“Some things are happening everywhere
but the supply chain is insufficient
and medicine takes months
to reach the hinterland.” (100)
“For until one is commodified,
there is heroin, the champagne to draw back,
always incorporation.” (101)
September 19, 2007
This book has that great sense of "feeling" personal without, at the same time, "feeling" like it is about/ or belongs to the author/ poet. It's called GRAVITY. Sometimes it's called EMOTION. Imagine that? Emotion in avant-garde poety? Yes, it happens. Fun. Engaging. Sexy at times. Intriguing first book. FIVE STARS!!!
August 7, 2007
CHOKER: candy hearts on tight elastic or one who places hands around throats to block air? Poems that float on that either/or, like Yahweh over the waters, edged as the self-help slogans they're named for. A "lemony beating" I did not a thing to prevent.
June 19, 2007
Published this one too. It's easily one of the best debuts of the new millenium.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews