Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize

“It is an enormous achievement – the creation of language-lavish landscapes in which the imagination is never exhausted.”
—Lyn Hejinian

An exuberant skeptic, Elizabeth Marie Young writes in the infidel hope that writing itself can create worlds. These hilariously erudite prose poems are cosmologies—miniature, ever-expanding universes crammed with over-active particulars. They are interactive environments, kaleidoscopic and incorrigibly changeable, in which competing impulses toward cerebral austerity and luxuriant beauty battle it out. These poems crystallize into radiant geometries even as they threaten to self-destruct: distinctly utopian, pulsing with the defiant exuberance of drag and disco and steeped in the lemonade oceans of Charles Fourier. Antiquity lingers as a locus of incomprehensibility, startling us into novelty. Elizabeth Marie Young coins new myths, drawing in classical material only to see how it looks wrestling in the mud with surfers, yogis, and cyborgs.

Fence Books, 2009
64 pages
ISBN: 978-1934200247

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EXCERPT

Aim Straight at the Fountain
and Press Vaporize

This is how innocence feels when lavender extract finagles the bloodsucking tides into formulas pumped with pro-vitamin B and the dirigibles (all joking aside) swell open like bloggers, mid-sentence, and shrug off the urge to engulf all the clouds in their high-minded cyclotron’s mirth. So spare me the bit about dead languages. This is not about love. It’s about body wash flowing into the sea, daggers thrown in the dirt and the plagiarists scrimming our grim penetralia’s possible. Look in the shatterless glass of the sun’s orrery. We can read the spare outline of birds flying north in our social security numbers and mouth the refrain of old songs like mechanical brides unplugged long enough to admire the sheets. They are white as Ophélia’s ubicomp angustifolia suckled on pluots and drowning in monochrome blitz like a wunderkid high on the raw promises of those huge sushi eyes.


Reviews

  • “Let us declare that one of the tasks of poetry is to linguisticate—to create refulgent and extraordinary language-worlds and rule over them with wit and felicity. This is the achievement of the luminous, quick-hearted, luscious poems in Liz Young’s brilliant debut volume. It is an enormous achievement—the creation of language-lavish landscapes in which the imagination is never exhausted. This volume is a guide to alternative word-worlds—it is their index. Those who read those worlds will learn a great deal about this one—and the next.”

    —Lyn Hejinian

  • “Elizabeth Marie Young’s poems feel like they were written by an eight-year-old genius. A collection of fantastical, dense, story-like prose poems, each individual piece in Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, mixes playfulness with vigorous intelligence and imagination into bombastic tales and personas.”

    —Ben Mirov (Bomb)

  • “Elizabeth Marie Young’s first book … swirls with delight in inventive language, jumps of psychic distance, and a comic display of irony, especially in its confrontation of two worlds: that of the classical Greek and Roman and that of our world, puffing with electronic misapprehension."

    —Sean Singer (The Rumpus)

  • Young (a classicist by training) wants to know how we sift through the stories, objects, and attitudes we inherit—some of which are marvelous and some too horrific to bear—to build our own narratives, our own houses. Each of the prose poems in this collection is a little world, full of violets, pluots, and bullets.

    —Rebecca Ariel Porte (Gizmodo)

  • The reader might approach these poems as if they were keyholes into a textual Möbius strip of temporary enlightenment.

    —Jacquelyn Davis (Book Slut)