Reviews for Elegy on toy piano

The average rating for Elegy on toy piano based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-11-19 00:00:00 Richard Watson I write and perform poetry. People ask me often what it is I do/did, after hearing a reading. This is because of the American notion of poetry as an antiquated museum device that is only seen in passing through required reading in a high school lit class and, thus not something that is important and evolving. Dean Young's book is one of the first I have read in a very long time that proved my own philosophy for poetry, that it is alive and only as important as the creativity we care to infuse the form with. Most poetry does belong in a museum. Young's work does not.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-04-08 00:00:00 Patrick Hanlin 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.