Praise for Creature Feature

“In Young's poems every new line bounds out of the brush, gazelle-like, with a reckless leap. The absurdity of his juxtapositions and the wildness of his enjambments can be funny, in a 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' sort of way, but . . . the randomness could suddenly yield to deep expressions of love and hurt.”—Jeff Gordinier, New York Times

“This posthumous collection completes a planned trilogy that began with Shock by Shock and Solar Perplexus. Lovingly assembled by his friends at Copper Canyon, these poems include haunting lines such as 'make every exit an entrance' and the last line of the final poem, which reads, 'The best endings are abrupt.'”—Erik Pedersen, SoCal News Group

“Young, whose appealingly surreal poetry anticipated and echoed the more disorienting zigzags of internet culture, died in his 60s in 2022; this collection applies his characteristically giddy sense of unraveling to his own life and ill health, in work that seems fully aware of being pre-posthumous.”—New York Times, Editor's Choice

“[Young] is not smug or cocky or supercilious. He’s congenial. Sometimes he makes me laugh. Even when I get lost, I don’t feel ignored. Or stupid. It’s like he’s a human being reaching out from a place of vulnerability. He knows nothing but experiences everything, which is a kind of vivid insight. I wouldn’t have missed reading Creature Feature. Not for anything.”—Helena Nelson, The Friday Poem

Praise for Dean Young

“Young has always stood out for his sharp humor, boundless poetic energy, and sheer readability. If adventurous poetry can sometimes feel like a tenuous tightrope walk, Young's poems feel more like zip lines.”—The Boston Globe

“This book reads like a long, breathless thank-you for life's seemingly random jumble of beauty, strangeness, tenderness and joy.”—Los Angeles Times

“With a transformed attention to life’s shifts and minutiae, Young’s signature unmoored poetics style is filled with quick shifts and leaps as he examines life’s surreal moments and unexpected humor.”—Publishers Weekly

“Young’s amiable Dadaism kindly and gently shows us the desperation and oblivion visible in good poetry. For all his comedic effects, there’s some serious work being done here. Young’s work withstands and encourages such serious treatment.”—Boston Review

“Mr. Young knows that to be truly reverent, the poet needs to be irreverent…But for all his humor and linguistic jazz, Mr. Young doesn’t shun the big questions.”—The New York Times

“The poems always seem to be flying away—from easy sense making, from themselves, from us. It’s almost as if they are birds. And, as birds, most of them soar well above the seed-pecked fields of contemporary poetry.”—Coldfront

“The language, the invention, the imagination, and the sheer fun of his poems are astounding.”—Charles Simic

“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.”—Kenneth Koch

“Dean Young’s poems are as entertaining as a three-ring circus and as imaginative as a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch. He is one of the most inventive and satisfying poets writing today.”—American Academy of Arts and Letters