Fall Higher

by Dean Young

Dean Young surmounts the failures of love and the body with his signature humor, verbal banter, and wild imaginative leaps. Embracing the elegiac, angry, and amorous with surrealistic wordplay and off-kilter music, Young coaxes us to "fall higher" into an intimate, vulnerable, expansive exchange. This is a major new book by one of America's most inventive poets.

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you,
jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5,
but now I want a Russian novel,
a 50 page description of you sleeping,
another 75 of what you think staring out
a window. I don't care about the plot
although I suppose there will have to be one,
the usual separation of the lovers, turbulent
seas, danger of de-commission in spite
of constant war, time in gulps and glitches
passing, squibs of threnody, a fallen nest,
speckled eggs somehow uncrushed, the sled
out-racing the wolves on the steppes, the huge
glittering ball where all that matters
is a kiss at the end of a dark hall . . .

Dean Young has published ten books of poetry, including finalists for the Pulitzer and Griffin Poetry Prizes. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

105 pages, Hardcover

First published April 26, 2011

About the author

Dean Young is the author of many collections of poetry, including Shock by Shock, Bender: New and Selected Poems, and Elegy on a Toy Piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.

Reviews

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was torn with this book: there were some poems that I thought were just stunning, and he reminded me of a surreal/bizarre version of Tony Hoagland with his casual tone and humor. However, some poems just passed right through me like water. It wasn't that they weren't well crafted, but that they were SO absurd or fragmented or random in their associations that I could not pull any meaning from them. (And maybe that is the point: this collection seems to be a postmodern existential or nihilistic approach to poetry). All in all, I enjoyed it, and there were some fine gems. Also, Dean Young is really clever with language--some poems were fun to read out loud just for the sound--almost as rythmic in beats as a hip hop song, at times. He certainly knows what he's doing. It's just that sometimes I was an adoring groupie and sometimes not so much.

[Cheryl Gatling]

My eight year old daughter saw me reading this book, and read the title out loud. She said, "I don't understand what it means: Fall Higher." I said, "No. You aren't going to understand what it means."

Dean Young is clever. He is delightfully, dazzlingly clever. He writes images that are striking and original, language that is musical, diction that runs the gamut from smoothly elevated to cheekily slangy. The poems are fun, mysteriously, dreamlike, and often hit you with a surprising stab of feeling. Many of the poems in this book are longing for an absent lover, or ruing mistakes made, and things lost. (I'm not up on the personal life of Dean Young, but it sounds like he got divorced in the past year.)

But... the poems don't actually make sense. You can't actually follow an argument or a story through them. Some of them read like random items thrown together-- beautiful, imaginative, clever, well-crafted items, but random nonetheless. I appreciate all the things that Dean Young does well. I enjoy those things as much as his many fans who wrote glowing blurbs for the book. But this one reader would enjoy Dean Young's poetry more if it made more sense.

[Ericstiens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dean Young is hardly some obscure poet, he has been a finalist for the Pulitzer after all, and won about a million other poetry awards. But somehow I missed this one when it came out. Read it today in one long gorgeous go, mostly out loud. Full of tricks and gimmicks and very small (and sometimes very big) allusions, yet utterly unpretentious and contemporary in the same way Tony Hoagland's poems are. A masterclass on how not to take oneself seriously while still writing poems that catch in the throats and hearts of their readers. Some of the poems feel a bit twee, but Young manages to make even the poem about poetry feel fresh and surprising. Yes, most of the poems are about love and death. Isn't that the point of poetry though?

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

No other poet can pack so many images into 103 pages. God it must be exhausting to be Dean Young. Does he ever stop seeing? He's lucky for it, and we're lucky to read his work. But myself, I can't fathom having that many pictures in my brain and getting them arranged together on paper.

"Mostly the world is lava's rhythm."

"Even the alligator, flipped over,
is soft as an eyelid."

"I've lost so much tackle in this stream."

"I love you for shattering."

"Honestly, ouch, beauty is."

"the sea's behaving abominably."

"it turns out a guitar is a lousy oar."

"the ocelot of my mind is out."

[John Wyszniewski · Rating 3 out of 5]

It must be me. The collection of poems by Dean Young seemed to be loved by many. And yet, I found their surrealism and tone distancing, but not in a good way. I struggled, unsure which thought was serious and genuine and which was purely absurd. I'm not a fan of the straight and narrow, and I don't need my writing to be easy. I'm up for the challenge, but unfortunately, this collection left me a little dry.

[Amanda Carver · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this months ago and couldn't get into it (because I am lazy). Then the Poetry Foundation announced that it was going to be their book club pick for February, and I tried again, this time maybe with a more critical, I'm-reading-this-for-a-class type of eye, and I loved it. For me, it was a collection of poems that required some work (did I mention I am a lazy reader?), but it's work and attention that pays off.

[Mario Adame · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dean is probably one of the most detailed poets of our time, who illustrates with words in the smoothest ways. Each page is a match, and his words are the striking spark for every moment he retold and how he set the reader’s eyes up for wanting more fire. Yes, his poems are that enlightening. His poems are fun, sensual, magical, political, a real deal, and I am very glad to have read each line. Thank you Dean Young.

[uena · Rating 5 out of 5]

'I didn't make a pass at your sister even years later at the airport bar.
I was a good glacier.'

'Every accident is organized by a secret system
and you're telling me life isn't personal?'

'Something is always tumbling
down the steps in my chest
carrying a birthday cake.'

'You are a five-foot nerve.'

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are phrases in this book that sound so familiar and perfect, like a phrase in the back of my mind, waiting to be said out loud. It's like, Dean Young has seen inside my heart--maybe your's too-- and he knows what keeps it pumping.

[Jeffrey Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the breadth of the NY School and the asides of confessionalism, Fall Higher offers a vertiginous display of virtuosity. Dazzling texture combined with inspiring day-to-day details make for a winning style. The verbal diamonds are ubiquitous but they fall slightly short of the richness they could have with a tad more grit and a tad less sparkle. Over easy and a bit runny but loved these poems just the same. RIP, genius dude. You gave us a sumptuous mouthful to chew over.

[Maggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I've liked Young's work in the past, some of the poems in this collection felt a bit glib, a bit formally/linguistically obvious in their total lack of meaning-making. Of course, some poems were innovative and sprightly and reconfirmed for me why Young is one of the best surreal collagists poetry has ever seen.

[Vaibhavee Nagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always always always come back to Delphiniums in a Window Box on summer Saturday afternoons. And I keep trying to go back to the day I first read this poem and I looove watching people read it for the first time

[Kimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

WRECK ME DEAN YOUNG

[Krzysztof · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I read this book, I thought of Robert Bly reading a poem of Alden Nowlan's. The poem is straight-forward and then comes the line, "it's one thing to jump a fence; quite another to blunder into one in the dark." Bly stops and says, "That's so strange."

I did that a bit more with this collection than with other Dean Youngiums. Then comes his Non-Apologia:

". . . Poetry paints nothing but it splashes
color, flushed, swooning, echolocating
and often associated with flight
as in Keats's viewless wings of Poesy,
a weird statement. The wings can't see?
Are invisible like Wonder Woman's plane?
Poetry is a good provider of the strange.
A hubcap waggle to me conviction.
No time for the present.
Beep ping dragon machine.
Perhaps even more than nonnative speakers,
poetry delights if you want not
the humdrum quotidian gist,
rather a sudden brain-spinning love
for a stranger wearing a coral necklace like the sea.
Even spiders sing. We are all arpeggios
make that archipelagos but oh, the butter
of your utterance unbanishing me
from the island of myself. Poetry is dandy
at supplying figurative language
which some find frustrating and evasive.
Why doesn't he just say outright
he wants to kiss her instead of going on
about butter? Well, screw you, to be sick
of metaphor is to be sick of the otherness
of life, in life which is like preferring
masturbation to the team sport . . ."


There's a good chance I'll read this again and give it 4-stars. As it is, it's getting three stars only in relation to his other books.

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

I should probably say that this simply wasn't for me.

As a physical artifact there is really nothing to complain about, as is usual for Copper Canyon press books. I have many of their hardbacks and paperbacks and they are routinely fine products and a good value for the cost.

The poetry simply did not do it for me, though. There were moments of brilliance but they were often of one clause length or less. They felt very much like pastiches (as in hodgepodges) instead of as coherent wholes. Sentences frequently did not make sense and, to me, the poems as a whole had no internal cohesion. In most cases I had no idea what each poem was supposed to be about. Being poetry, some of this is, of course, fine. But a whole book's worth of it?

There was one poem which I liked overall ("Non-Apologia") even though it is guilty of many of the faults I just expressed. This poem, though, is about language, words, and poetry and thus is demonstrating these 'techniques' in service of showing what language and a poem can do. I do, though, think it could have been an even better poem if the pyrotechnics had been reined in slightly.

I wanted to like this book, as my love chose it for me as a birthday present. Sadly, I jut couldn't.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Dean Young's poetry is probably the most paradox-like experience I've ever had in my life. His poetry is surreal - made up of many concrete images that can be so bizarre to visualize. The strange thing here is that nevertheless, these wild images are accompanied by a feeling that the poet knows you. To me, he really knows how to put into words those fleeting feelings that are very much present though we may not know fully how to describe them. His daring images capture those sensations we can't quite, and in just a perfect way that even though you may be reading the most bizarre poem you've read in your life, something resonates with you because you know he put into words a feeling you haven't figured out how to describe yet. His poetry is also filled with humor and wit and this is just a fantastic collection overall.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this man's work, I do. Been slowly picking through this one for months.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first tried reading Dean Young I was too firmly in the camp of The Need for Accessibility in Poetry to appreciate his oblique angles and bizarre mash-ups. This time around I delighted in his humor and his way of accepting the world without ignoring its horrors. Or maybe Young's just gotten better? In any case I chuckled my way through this most recent book and agreed with the Booklist blurb that noted "Surrealism seldom seems as much like real life as in Young's hilarious and cautionary poems." It's a little like those pictures where you have to let your eyes go lazy for the 3-D image to emerge from the surface patterns. If you're willing to float, you can have a rollicking good read in Young's work.

[Brian Collier · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Young writes, in the poem "Lucifer,": "Mostly the world is lava's rhythm, the impurities of darkness sometimes called stars. Mostly the world is assignations, divorces conducted between rooftops. Forever and forever the checkbook unbalanced..." I feel like he gets me, or at least I'm not some strange, foreign body bobbing up and down in cold waters. I guess that's good writing for me, that feeling like an author is putting his or her arm around my shoulder and pulling back the curtain a little bit. In "Scarecrow on Fire" he writes, "Maybe poems are made of breath, the way water, cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul, freed."

[Hafidha · Rating 5 out of 5]

As poetry collections go, this one is pretty bad-ass. You'll need to spend some time with each of these poems; not for casual reading in between errands. Thoroughly inspiring, though at times I wondered if Young was being clever. What makes this poetry contemporary is its sense of fragmentation - he fashions all the random, discombobulating pieces of modern American life into a mosaic of sorts, without trickery. There is wisdom here, the wisdom of fully engaging in life and feeling all its hurts and joys, yet taking none of them personally. A must-buy for me.

[Maddelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The straight-up rhyme poems kind of threw me (I'm not convinced it works), but loved the rest. Funny, heartbreaking, and surreal -- as usual. Excerpts from some of my favorites:

Have you noticed how ants meet?
Their language single molecules exchanged,
that's why they keep so clean.
They say Here and Hello.
They say Found and How far.

They touch each other all over. --from "After My Own Heart"

~ ~ ~

Love floats its bone in the throat,
sometimes it hurts to swallow. --from "Optimistic Poem"

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dean Young is not a poet I return to again and again to feed my soul. His books aren't the ones I want to curl up in a chair with on a snowy winter day. But.... He does speak to me as a writer because he loves language and plays with it in a deadly serious way. He inspires me to write, makes me want to push myself farther. Surreal and funny and ironic and heartbreaking--he's all of them. This book was a great read. If you're a poet, you need to know what Young is doing--study him. If you're a reader of poetry, read him to understand why poets love language and why you should too.

[Helen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dean Young writes surreal, twisty poems made of random metaphors and strings of words no one would have dreamt to put together. Sometimes it strikes just the right note, like in the poem Changing Genres, where life before love is described as a haiku, and everything after is a Russian novel. But most of it leaves me a bit cold, leaving not a spark in head or heart, just a scratch. I love surreal poetry, but its got to be something more than just weird.

[D'Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truth be told, I think this collection was a little too long. Then again, maybe it's my attention span that is the problem. Regardless, this collection also includes some of the most amazing Dean Young poems I've ever read. And that trumps all.

[Erneilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just don't get surreal poetry. Perhaps I lack the sophistication and I will be the first to place the blame squarely on myself, but this little volume did nothing for me. Considering the reviews I read in the paper, I suppose I was hoping for more.

[Renée · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best book I've read all year. I don't even have the language to praise it, but the reviews it has received from others (Tony Hoagland, Threepenny Review, etc.) are not hyperbolic.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read in a claw-foot bathtub in my girlfriend's mother's apartment overlooking some other large body of Vermont water, I don't know for sure, I don't even know.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Man Overboard" might be my favorite poem of the year.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not my favorite of Dean Young's books, but there are certainly gorgeous poems here, particularly in the last section. As always, his voice is warm and human, his words both playful and serious.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is a link to my profile of Dean Young: http://jchariscarlson.blogspot.com/20...