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Pleasure

Gary Young

96 pp (6 x 8)
Trade Paper, ISBN: 1-59714-023-6, $12.95

A new collection from a master of the prose poem

Who would volunteer to live any moment more than once? I might. This morning I smelled freesias in the garden and closed my eyes. Suddenly I was young again, and you were still alive.

With subtlety and a big heart, Young pokes around a subject that is seldom written about with the same care and attention to detail as the darker themes of death and pain—pleasure.

In No Other Life, Young examined the scary, unstoppable forces from which we seek shelter. In Pleasure, he doesn’t ignore them, but rather turns his gaze on those moments of huddled comfort, and finds joy in his children’s raw honesty and in the sensuousness of food, flowers, and everyday life.

As approachable as it is masterful, Pleasure is itself a reason to smile.

Reviews:

"Gary Young has honed a sinuous, brief prose-poem form that carries a flavor uniquely its own—unflinching, stringent in beauty, austerely moving."—Jane Hirschfield

"Gary Young’s project in Braver Deeds is to ask unsentimentally what a body’s terms are, how much it can take. His answers are the more affecting for how formal he has had to make them. Loosen just a hair, his poems imply, and it won’t seem worth it to go on."—James McMichael

"Transparent and refreshing, vital like the stream that flows through the ‘insulating mist’ of his canyon, Gary Young’s beautiful Days flow on in elegant simplicity. This is a book Basho would admire."—Sam Hamill

About the Author:

A versatile poet and book artist, Gary Young also edits for the Greenhouse Review Press. His work has been featured in magazines including The American Poetry Review and The Kenyon Review, and his printing appears in major museums. In 2003 he won the William Carlos Williams Award for No Other Life, also available from Heyday Books.