An Inventory of Almost Everything

“The endless urge to organize, categorize, and catalogue is here put to wild and gorgeous extremes.”
—Julie Carr

In Young’s much-anticipated second poetry collection, lists allow for the poetic embrace of a bewildering world that cannot be comprehended but can be endlessly explored as a catalogue of terrors, treasures and marvels. The poems in An Inventory of Almost Everything move back and forth, like the list form itself, between mundane reality and extravagant fantasy. They engage the form’s trajectory from Babylonian star catalogues to Buzzfeed’s “24 Tumblr Posts That Are Just Kind of Weirdly Pure.” Here, the built-in rigidity of the form serves as a counterpoint to explorations of what is uncontainable and incomprehensible—consciousness, eroticism, spirituality. The list’s incantatory force is harnessed to examine and resist the “powers” that attempt to contain and control contemporary bodies and minds: religion, science, technology, politics and the pervasive discourse of self-optimization.

Subpress, 2026
106 pages
ISBN: 978-734130065

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EXCERPT

I Give You a Poem That Never Ends

I give you a poem that never ends.
I give you a poem in which the last
words taste like bubble wrap.
I give you a late-night conga line through
the trash-strewn streets of Bushwick.
My poem will have huge biceps.
My poem will burst like a blister.
I give you a poem whose ending sounds
like vodka evaporating.
Pass out the hand sanitizer, this poem’s
about to get funky.
It won’t take no for an answer.
I give you a poem that winds up in
a Petri dish having been rendered
otherworldly.
A poem that loses clumps of hair when
the barometric pressure drops.
A poem with puny fists.
A poem that ends with a party gag
in the quietest place on earth.
Please hold me, the poem pouts.
This poem’s a bit of a jerk but it has
an excellent mouthfeel.
I give you a poem that ends with an
exodus of elephants flown in
from Kenya.
A poem that ends with a hunger
I myself have never known,
with a short quotation from
Molière, with stardust in its nose.
This poem pleads not guilty.
Nevertheless, it could end up
in your junk mail.
It’s about to lose its temper.
It’s about to stuff itself into a beat-up
Mitsubishi.
It swims out in the open water
to nourish your naked soul.
It says oh yes and stays forever.
It began when you opened your eyes.
It will end when you stop breathing.


Reviews

  • “The endless urge to organize, categorize and catalogue is here put to wild and gorgeous extremes, generating an absurdist aesthetic of gathering-the-ungatherable. In the maximalist tradition of Whitman and Swinburne, Breton and Césaire, Joe Brainard, Bernadette Mayer and Lyn Hejinian (the list goes on!), here is Elizabeth Marie Young’s wild imagination expanding like the universe, spinning like an electron, drawing us in and out simultaneously. '“Be joyful Be chaotic.” Forget yourself and let in the world’s overflow, “all of it and all of it an endless race against so what.” Yes!”

    —Julie Carr, author of The Garden

  • “An epic effort of listing: for desire, for encouragement, for gratitude, for the pleasure of strange juxtaposition mixed with insightful recognition. Here we have poems of accretion that share both question and quest. In conversation with cosmic origins and contemporary events, borrowing from self-help mantra, the poetic diary and surrealist catalogues, An Inventory of Almost Everything is a vibrant jamboree of poetic parataxis; it’s a relational network of delight.”

    —Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure