Book Review: Design With X by Dean Young

Design With X: Torgo approves

This is the first time I haven't been able to find the book cover, so I went with an author photo. The book cover reprints De Humani Corporis by Andreas Vesalius:


It's a fitting picture for this book.

This is Dean Young's first book. If you know me, you know I'm a big fan of his. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer recently with "Elegy on Toy Piano," a terrific book.

Nobody's first book is every good. At least not when you've read the later work. This is the problem with any poet's Collected Poems. The first 50 pages usually suck.

Wikipedia (where I was went just to track down a cover photo, unsuccessfully) compares Young to O'Hara, Ashbery, and the surrealists. I think this early book shows his debt to James Wright. Every American poet owes a debt to James Wright. If Whitman and Dickinson are the Joseph and Mary (or holy spirit and Mary) of American poets, then Wright is the Jesus.

Young's surrealism isn't in full force here. That's disappointing, but expected. There are glimmers of what's to come. There are also many, many poems that exploit his medical background (which his author's note says was a year at nursing school). Hence the cover picture.

The best example, as I see it, of the poet he's since become is in "The Breakers," which begins with him remembering a summer when he "slept with a girl / 6, 7, 8 months pregnant, not mine..." and goes on to say:

Once, working in a zoo, I had to kill
an ostrich that had garroted itself
in a wire fence. I had to shoot it
in the head, that small ostrich head.
Nowhere to bury it, said the supervisor,
besides a corpse that size needed
Health Department approval so I had to
chain-saw it for the incinerator. Where
does a story like this end? The top drawer
with the pistol? Calming the thing?
The stench of chain-saw oil and burning feathers?
The walk home, woozy as if on earth
after a long boat ride?

Maybe I've already gone on too long.
Sometimes memory seems a scholarly
form of cruelty, the way it always
comes back to now with all the precedents
of loss and cowardice and no mercy.


That's great. That's the Young of his later books. Most of the rest of the book isn't that good, but it's still an easier read than Ashbery.