All posts tagged: Carrie A. Purcell

2012 Staff Picks: Carrie A. Purcell reviews Dean Young’s Bender

Bender: New and Selected Poems Dean Young Copper Canyon Press, 2012 By Carrie A. Purcell, Poetry Northwest Volunteer Coordinator Dean Young’s most recent collection Bender (Copper Canyon 2012) is aptly titled. In this somewhat lengthy collection (it does cover his previous twelve books) Young’s command of discord and resolution are on full display, and the scattershot can make one feel the late-night room spin. Young is after the full force of the world’s oddities; he writes in “Frotage,”  “How goofy and horrible is life. Just look into the faces of lovers as they near their drastic destinations…Just look at them handling the vase priced beyond the rational beneath the sign stating the store’s breakage policy, and what is the rational but a thing we must always break.” Young gleefully “breaks the rational” in Bender.  His narrative voices are by turns drunk, acerbic, wistful, ridiculous, tender. They speak with authority, however, even if only over the non-sequential details of their biographies: “It seemed … all would be familiar as the beloved’s name heard in a crowd, my …