Poet Dean Young

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Young's pleasure in putting a reference to Moby Dick right next to an image of hang gliding is flashy and memorable, but it doesn't hide the sense of sadness beneath these lines, the unironic, tragic notion that we can't really influence the facts of our own lives.

In "Evening Primrose," an earlier poem in the same collection, Young writes quite seriously about the nature of Beauty (using the nineteenth-century-style capital letter), while disguising his seriousness by jumping through examples from our cultural moment in a manner that might confuse readers not used to this technique. Still, in the middle of the poem, he gets to this place: