Saint Raphael Kalinowski Book

Dean Young's style is seductive yet hard to imitate. It's funny, "random," hip, ironic, but founded on a strong bed of sincere inquiry. A poem says, "DNA is surreal because / a fair amount of it is gibberish / [...] and as such purely artistic," which is funny and authentic and somehow persuasive.

The typical poem is a longish single stanza of free verse lines, a shape Young proves to be versatile. One poem is a catalog of recent deaths ("Two were in their 70s, that's not so old!"); another, a percentage breakdown of how much the speaker likes his friends; another, a True/False quiz, probably the book's most famous creation. I showed this poem to my students in a few classes, had them read it out loud, and respond as honestly as possible to the questions. They found some completely insignificant ("74. Zinc."), others conventional if also intrusive ("87. I believe in God."), and still others to be surprisingly pointed inquiries into their ethical beliefs ("58. Criminals should not be allowed to lift weights.") or their ideas of truth ("34. There are more colors now than twenty years ago.") This poem, "True/False," is a good barometer for the whole book's range, the various ways it engages the reader's mind.

I felt most disengaged from the book when it gets so fragmentary the pieces bear no relation to each other, which happens in predictable ways. Here's a passage from "I Saw My Life Go By in the Coyote's Jaws":

Between queen.
Dream disjointer.
Furry Dionysus
who you never know
which way he/she will go,
everyone perfectly okay
with the vintage then boom
your head's knocked off,
jade monkey crushed,
moon fallen in a mess of kite string.

We're being told the sloppiness of the lines is okay through appeals to dream and Dionysian madness, but it's not really all that fun to read. There's something stale about the "boom," the kind of thing we have come to associate with "voice poets." Also stale: the image of the moon as a kite. It's not terrible, but it's not fresh.

I suppose I rounded this down from, like, 4.4 stars. It's a lovely, funny, charmingly weird book that mostly succeeds in its weird mashup of the elegiac and ludicrous.