First Course in Turbulence

by Dean Young

Overview

Finalist for ForeWord Magazine 1999 Poetry Book of the Year



With rapid shifts between subject and tone, sometimes within single poems, Dean Young’s latest book explores the kaleidoscopic welter of art and life. Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes the joke. With surrealist volatility, these poems are the result of experiments that continue for the reader during each reading. Young moves from reworkings of creation myths, the index of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, pseudo reports and memos, collaged biographies, talking clouds, and worms, to memory, mourning, sexual playfulness, and deep sadness in the course of this turbulent book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822956976
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	04/01/1999
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Dean Young has published eight previous books, most recently elegy on toy piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Embryoyo. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts as well as an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches in the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Table of Contents

1
	If Thou Dislik'st What Thou First Light'st On	3
	The Infirmament	5
	The Unattainable	6
	Acceptance Speech	8
	Tiger	10
	Warbler	12
	He Said Turn Here	14
	Bird Sanctuary	16
	Sky Dive	18
	Familiar Territory	20
	The Invention of Heaven	22
	Tribe	23
2
	Only One of My Deaths	27
	And Because Her Face	28
	Colophon	30
	Maybe It Meant Something Else	32
	Lives of the Inventors	34
	Mortal Poem	36
	Arts of Camouflage	38
	Lives of the Painters	40
	Don't Wear That Shirt with Those Pants	42
	Unthreatening Gestures	44
	Chapped Lips	45
	Faculty Summary Report	46
	The Oversight Committee	49
	Bay Arena	51
	Myth Mix	55
3
	Guidance Counseling	61
	Safe Sex	63
	A Student in a Distant Land	65
	Another Hive	67
	Robert Desnos (1900-1945)	69
	Archeology	71
	Drinking from a Puddle	74
	Dog Toy	75
	Agony in the Garden	78
	The Velvet Underground	80
	The Woman Who Parks in Front of My House	82
	God Son	84
	Three Weeks Late	86
	Easily Bruised	88
	Lives of the Poets	90
	Acknowledgments	93

What People are Saying About This

Kenneth Koch

"Dean Young's exhilarating, complex, and wide-ranging poems give one the impression of conversations with an angel in which the poet has to be super-alert at every second, for every second counts and the angel knows everything. To listen to these conversations is to experience a colloquial, witty, emotional, and urgent discourse not to be found anywhere else."— - Columbia University

Editorial Reviews

First Course in Turbulence contains poems filled with a rich imagination, wit, humor and astounding ways in which the language can be stretched to uncover ironies, startling correspondences, and ultimately, alternative perspectives. Fasten your seatbelts. Enjoy the ride.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Dean Young’s fourth book is caffeinated, frantic. The speaker of these poems is highly attuned to the world, but utterly befuddled by it . . . Theories, conversations, books, friends, mishaps, and other minutiae blend into each other. . . The core struggle here is how one goes about assigning meaning to the arbitrary. Mythologies, once created, rush toward their inevitable collapse.”
—Boston Book Review


"In this aptly titled collection, Dean Young challenges the reader to hang on as he jigs from one poetic style to another and sets a wondrous course across a Duchampian landscape."
—Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher

Dean Young's fourth book is caffeinated, frantic. The speaker of these poems is highly attuned to the world, but utterly befuddled by it . . . Theories, conversations, books, friends, mishaps, and other minutiae blend into each other. . . The core struggle here is how one goes about assigning meaning to the arbitrary. Mythologies, once created, rush toward their inevitable collapse.

Boston Book Review

Dean Young's exhilarating, complex, and wide-ranging poems give one the impression of conversations with an angel in which the poet has to be super-alert at every second, for every second counts and the angel knows everything. To listen to these conversations is to experience a colloquial, witty, emotional, and urgent discourse not to be found anywhere else.

Columbia University Kenneth Koch

In this aptly titled collection, Dean Young challenges the reader to hang on as he jigs from one poetic style to another and sets a wondrous course across a Duchampian landscape.

Chicago Tribune