Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems

by C. Dale Young

Overview

C. Dale Young, Winner of the 2017 Hanes Award in Poetry from The Fellowship of Southern Writers, brings together decades of work in Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems. These lyrics cut cleanly and exquisitely, performing a sacrifice at the altar of language. Remedying the inaccurate reports missionaries left in their “filthy journals,” “Memento” imagines instead the surgical precision Aztec priests must have used to “slice from the umbilicus up and through the diaphragm,” keeping the heart “while discarding the body, the feeble thing / tumbling down the steps of the pyramid.” As a tenured artist and veteran doctor, Young writes with a dual awareness of life’s fragility and the lyric’s endurance, presenting readers with new work that is entirely fresh even as it speaks to his broader legacy and dialogues with his preceding oeuvre. This book unfolds like the poet’s experience of time: “‘All my life.’ It sounds so odd to say that out loud. / But strange thing after strange thing transpired.” Representing the still-warm heart, what will one day be the only surviving memento of the outlasted body that bore them, these poems explore the author’s simultaneous embrace of mortality’s richness and resignation to death’s inevitable decay. Young surveys the perpetual ultimatum of his roles: as an oncologist, the patients (including his parents) he couldn’t save; as an artist, the self he intends to confront honestly as his body ages; and, as a mortal raised with stories of the Taino gods, the impossibility of building the perfect animal. When teaching bedside manner, how to break the news to a patient that their cancer will kill them, Young’s student “wants a guide, a checklist,” he says, “but nothing like that exists. It has never existed.” Building the Perfect Animal is a monument to that inconceivable instruction manual, honoring the ceaselessly unprecedented work and gift of being now alive.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781961897328
Publisher:	Four Way Books
Publication date:	03/15/2025
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He is the author of The Affliction (Four Way Books, 2018), a novel in stories, and the poetry collections The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern, 2001); The Second Person (Four Way Books, 2007), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; Torn (Four Way Books, 2011), named one of the best poetry collections of 2011 by National Public Radio; The Halo (Four Way Books, 2016), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; and Prometeo (Four Way Books, 2021). He is a previous recipient of the Grolier Prize, the Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Literary Editing, and the 2017/2018 Hanes Award in Poetry given by the Fellowship of Southern Writers to honor a poet at mid-career. A fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, his poems and short fiction have appeared widely. He lives in San Francisco.
 

Read an Excerpt

“The Falling Man” 

The story is missing, so I fill it in—
it’s what a thinking person does to cope. 
Without the details, only Death can win.

And so, the panic invariably set in,
the fires on lower floors extinguishing hope. 
The story is missing, so I fill it in.

Standing on a desk, he chose the lesser sin. 
The floor, too hot to stand on, began to slope. 
Without the details, only Death can win.

The shattered glass, the beams then caving in, 
could anyone sane maintain a shred of hope? 
The story is missing, so I fill it in.

I need to know the way his mind gave in
as smoke engulfed the room. Who could cope? 
Without the details, only Death can win.

And out the window, like the smoke’s fin,
he flew. He plunged to something green like hope. 
Without the details, only Death can win.
The story is missing, so I fill it in.

Editorial Reviews

Graceful and thrilling, C. Dale Young’s Building the Perfect Animal is a tour de force. Over three decades, Young has built, book by book, an unforgettable body of work that seems to have arrived fully formed, like one of the old gods of the ocean rising from the water: chiseled, melancholy, and brimming with heart. This book will enchant you and refuse to let you go.
—Tomás Q. Morín
 

C. Dale Young’s Building the Perfect Animal opens with a heart being set in the torso of the first man, then a soul being set in that heart. It calls to mind Genesis’s explosion of light, but Young’s illuminations come from the chest, the big beating heart of experience. From Ovid to foie gras ducks, from Patroclus to Golden Gate Park, the new poems yearn and tumble toward meaning. This volume also offers verse curated from Young’s thirty years of singular writing, poems I read with delight and humility, each page demonstrating why he has become, for so many, indispensable, something real, something lasting.
—Kaveh Akbar

 

For thirty years, C. Dale Young has quietly written moving poems of clarity and precision. In Building the Perfect Animal, we appreciate not only these strengths in the new poems, but see within the generous selection from prior books the entirety of his deeply humane vision. Despite their intelligence, his poems stand as a record of the heart and body, a record of empathy.
—Natasha Trethewey

From the Publisher