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Poetry

Dean Young has published twelve books of poetry, including Elegy on Toy Piano, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize; Primitive Mentor, a finalist for the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize; Fall Higher; and Bender: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He has also written a book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction. The recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Young is the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin.

Photograph by Matt Valentine.

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Two Poems

by Dean Young

Three Weeks from
Two Days Ago

Waiting is the moon, waiting the groom
in the little boy. The red minute waits
in the white afternoon, the dream in the daylit
consciousness. Is god what’s waiting

to hear back, we the message sent out
into the void? You wait for something to appear
but in most cases the opposite is true,
wait long enough it’s all gone, the year’s

preparatory nubs on the weeping pussy willow,
pregnant woman in the airport taxi queue
reading a book of names. Alphabet
to be rearranged into the spelling of your name


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