Creature Feature

The heartachingly searching, irreverently wisecracking, and stubbornly uncompromising poems that walked a formal tightwire just before Young's death in 2022.

Creature Feature is Dean Young's first posthumous collection since his death in 2022. More feisty, hilarious, surreal, and heartbreaking than ever, Young and his tireless inventiveness are on full display in fierce poems that refuse to compromise yet are guided by love and amazement at living. These poems resound with risk-taking, mischief, and aching beauty. Young remains committed to the generative possibilities of poetry even as he writes his own elegy again and again.

Young envisioned Creature Feature to serve as the third and final installment in a trilogy that includes Shock by Shock (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and Solar Perplexus (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). Together, these three books were imagined during the turbulent years following his successful heart-transplant surgery, and they demonstrate a vigorous recommitment to artistic recklessness and poetic inventiveness. Through all their painful genius, these poems reveal an abiding awareness that time is short and art in our time is more urgent than ever.

Dean Young (1955-2022) was the author of seventeen books of poetry and poetic theory. His iconic, comedic style was derived from the New York School of Poetry and from contemporary art movements like Surrealism and Dadaism. In an interview with the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Young said, "For me the human drama, the squishy, time-limited pulse, is always at the center of the poem." His book Elegy on Toy Piano was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, and his work has been celebrated with the Academy Award in Literature and the Colorado Prize for Poetry. The former Texas Poet Laureate, Dean Young received multiple fellowships, including the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, the Stegner Fellowship, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.