Solar Perplexus - Softcover

Young, Dean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556596197 ISBN 13: 9781556596193

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2021

Synopsis

In Solar Perplexus, Dean Young uses the surreal as the thread which weaves in and out of complications of existence. The result is a textured, honest work that grapples with what it means to love, lose, and hang in the afterward. Suddenly the boundaries of our everyday are shaken―and yet instead of being thrown off balance, our understanding is cracked open. Young holds us between un/reality, tracing the circle of life and death, and exposing the true closeness between extremes. It is this true intimacy that both unsettles and comforts. Solar Perplexus turns identity on its head as it questions self (against) control, with each eerily familiar moment of humor punctuated with an inevitable doubt.

About this title

About the Author

Dean Young is the author of seventeen books of poetry and poetic theory. His iconic, comedic style is 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, and his work has been celebrated with the Academy Award in Literature and the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Dean Young served as the Texas Poet Laurate and has received multiple fellowships, including the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, the Stegner Fellowship, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He currently holds the position of William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas, Austin.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Corpse Pose

It’s not like there’s a sound
no caterwaul or oceanic gasp,
no popping root hairs of a carrot
yanked but I’m looking down
on my body growing translucent,
a single set of clown teeth
chattering inside. Huh.
So I guess I have a soul after all,
it wasn’t just my hamster’s death
causing a lump or that electric snap
when I first saw Laurie, neither
1000 doves impaling themselves
on a glass dagger Breton said it was
nor some palooka’s boxing glove.
I shouldn’t have expected so much
from sex, 3-D printers and swans
but it wasn’t that awful stalled
in the blizzard. Of course the lecture
goes on forever but it’s almost funny,
falling from the vascular tree.
Tiny spiders live so high
they must survive on air,
never hungover, never hit with fist
or restraining order, defying
that old dualism, flirting at the party
like it’s never been spurned.


Someone Has to Be Lowered into the Whale Skull for the Ambergris

Once I seduced a woman by misquoting
Rilke on the steps of an observatory.
Her mouth tasted like snow.
Have you ever woken upside-down?
All of us for a while were birds.
Even a crocodile remembers the egg,
even my dog although her expressive
options are limited to running around
sniffing and barking at I know not
nothing until she turns into a ball
of light. Lilacs pulse, dew
democratizes, wing-nubs ache
the back and by August the grasshoppers
are big as shotgun shells. Under
an oak someone had driven a spike into
the tree had nearly consumed, she broke
up with me then we wandered
through a greenhouse exhibit
of carnivorous orchids and goodbye
hand-fucked in the car so
you can believe me when I say
everything is singing and love
is eternal and wake up and smell the gasoline.


At Shangyang’s

Friends, it’s difficult to talk about poetry
which is why we’re all talking at once
about something else: who can use whose
mythology and bathroom, magic mushrooms,
phlogiston, Czechoslovakian milk production,
a single use of the word black in Ovid.
Shining discs have been spotted siphoning
off libraries dot by dot. Did we pump
blood back into the construct just
to club ourselves to death with hood ornaments?
News from the crystal world isn’t good.
News from the elephant’s worse.
But what’s pirouetting in the fire
might not be only ash.
One of us brings a fang.
In rushing water, another sees the face of his father.
One lights his cave with chrysanthemums.


Demonic Possession Is 9/10ths the Law

Do not thaw the alien.

If the landlord tells you
not to hang a mirror in that room,
do not hang a mirror in that room.

Do not jump off a train in the Carpathians
to investigate a castle ruin.

A stake through the heart
is only half of it.

Put no faith in a sequel.

The ultimate monster is always the self.


Anniversary Poem

When you gave me a walnut,
it was different than when you gave me
a monarch wing which I taped
to my notebook. Other things
I’ve taped: flattened wildflowers,
a leaf that was in the tub with you,
a few dead ants who were red and black
like Mayan gods. I recommend packing tape,
it’s wide and strong and doesn’t yellow.
When you gave me the walnut
I wondered if I should eat it,
put it in a drawer with the glove
I found in a rosebush, plant it or give it
to a squirrel to more professionally plant.
We talked it over without talking,
putting our hands inside each other’s coats
while snow crystalized small bits
of oblivion which doesn’t seem like
people’d have heart attacks shoveling
but you’d be wrong. The walnut
had not come from the millionaire-hippy co-op
where once I ate a rotisserie chicken
in my car in the parking lot for warmth
waiting for a tow truck jump.
If I had called you, you would
have been in New York which is where
you were. Sometimes I’m there
with you looking at filtched treasure
from the pyramids but also in Iowa City,
Berkeley, Bloomington, even Columbia,
Pennsylvania where I was born and learned
to walk down alleys to the river
befriending sad, fenced-in dogs,
not even caring if I ever got married
but if you asked, I would have asked you.


More Tales from the Crypt

Despite its supposed jeweled movement
and rocket mechanics, my new heart’s
no more accurate, bowstring
still snapped, kitten just as frazzled.
They wouldn’t let me keep my old heart
because it was sliced out and burned
so I wasn’t able to take a bite
like any warrior would his enemy’s
to become a greater warrior. Nope.
Apparently not even worth dissecting
or feeding to that starved lion
rescued from a Dallas junkyard,
never to be jarred in my office
between my alien skull and complete
works of Vesalius and Sun Ra
to show where poetry comes from
like when Matthew smashed through
a plate-glass door and just kept going.

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556596197
• ISBN 13: 9781556596193
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96