Torn

by C. Dale Young

Overview

In Torn, C. Dale Young continues his earnest investigations into the human, depicted as both spiritual being and a process, as “the soul and its attendant concerns” and as a device that “requires charge, small / electrical impulses / racing through our bodies.” What Young tells and shows us, what his poems let us hear, does not aim to reassure or soothe. These are poems written from “white and yellow scraps / covered with words and words and more words— // I may never find the right words to describe this.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935536062
Publisher:	Four Way Books
Publication date:	03/08/2011
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Author of three poetry collections, C. DALE YOUNG practices medicine in San Francisco and teaches at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program.

Table of Contents

Windows • La Revancha del Tango • En Fuego • Reciprocity • The Kiss • Blood • Fourteen • Clean • Body & Soul • The Bridge • The Second Omen: Spring • Few Shall Answer • Inheritance • Nature • Paying Attention • Recitativo • Quiet City • Stone and Fire • At Camp Galileo • The Seventh Circle • In the Chen Style • Or Something Like That • The Moss Garden • Late Poem • Wind • The Argument • In the Cutting Room • The Ether Dome • Corpus Medicum • Imprimatur • 'The Personal • Self Portrait at 4 AM • Sepsis • Documenting the Light • Against Divination • Deus ex machina • Torn • Notes

What People are Saying About This

Natasha Trethewey

“…Torn, examines the body and mind in various states, grappling with—in meditations on God, fear, and failure—our mortality. Beneath all this is a quest for beauty and evidence of the poet’s deeply humane intelligence and the breadth of his sensibilities.”

Mark Doty

"C. Dale Young's poems employ sly forms of repetition as if to guide us along the poem's winding way. How important--and how fierce--these directions turn out to be as his poems push into their deepest territory."

Editorial Reviews

Most of the poems in Young's articulate and honest third collection say something to, and about, the facts of his life: his Catholic and Latino heritage, his years spent in Boston, his residence in San Francisco, his training as a physician, and his self-discovery as a gay man. "Dear God, what was it you placed in the heart," he asks, "not of necessity, but because it is the center/ of all moral forces and impulses?" Such slightly elevated language and the sound effects that go with it (occasional rhyme, the specter of pentameter) serves Young well, though his earnestness can topple over into predictability: "We choose not to believe./ We continue living. We refuse to grieve." When he writes about his medical education, however, in the last part of the book, Young (The Second Person) acquires a harsh light that belongs to him alone: we see the "lime-like pale green" of "a room in which to dissect cadavers," we hear of the thoughtless doctor who "announced to everyone that you were the best/ minority student she had ever had," and we learn how Young defines "‘the healing arts,'/ that strange desire to fix the human machine." (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Most of the poems in Young's articulate and honest third collection say something to, and about, the facts of his life: his Catholic and Latino heritage, his years spent in Boston, his residence in San Francisco, his training as a physician, and his self-discovery as a gay man. "Dear God, what was it you placed in the heart," he asks, "not of necessity, but because it is the center/ of all moral forces and impulses?" Such slightly elevated language and the sound effects that go with it (occasional rhyme, the specter of pentameter) serves Young well, though his earnestness can topple over into predictability: "We choose not to believe./ We continue living. We refuse to grieve." When he writes about his medical education, however, in the last part of the book, Young (The Second Person) acquires a harsh light that belongs to him alone: we see the "lime-like pale green" of "a room in which to dissect cadavers," we hear of the thoughtless doctor who ‘announced to everyone that you were the best/ minority student she had ever had," and we learn how Young defines " ‘the healing arts,'/ that strange desire to fix the human machine.’”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher