Museum of the Soon to Depart - (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry) by Andy Young (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A poetic exploration of life amid intimate losses.

In Museum of the Soon to Depart, poet Andy Young searches for her place in history as it unfolds around her through revolution, plague, and natural disaster. As curator of her museum, she navigates her own and others' suffering through intense observation, from the inner mechanisms of grief and illness to the solace of distance provided by photography. The material of the poet's own life and events on the world stage intertwine, resulting in poems with a staggering range, inhabiting language in ways that ultimately point to its limits.

Review Quotes

"Andy Young is a New Orleans based poet whose super power is to explore mortality, morbidity, grief, and death with poems in expressive and powerful language that allow us to traverse her collection Museum of the Soon to Depart as fellow travelers journeying the realms between living and dying. Young's work locates the body and spirit of two deltas: one in America, the other in Egypt. Land and water hold tokens of human creativity, depravity, fear, and love allowing a range of artists to create works that inspire her and curate this imaginary museum. Young's poetry is one more example of the terrifying beauty that American poets seek to make and in doing so she enters that portal to the sublime and takes us along for the tour."-- "Patricia Spears Jones, author of The Beloved Community"

"Andy Young's Museum of the Soon to Depart is a monumental act of conjuring sung to a canny and poignant elegiac dirge. In ekphrastic poems that animate art back to the lives it depicted, and in many of the traveling poems that crisscross oceans and centuries to reach their studies, Young gently awakens those who go unmourned to receive her farewell prayers. At once tender and exacting, the poet guides these lives deep into our memories, illuminating depths of solace and sorrow we did not know existed within us. Museum of the Soon to Depart is a powerful, moving book of poems by a poet of remarkable gifts."-- "Khaled Mattawa"

"The complexity of language and vision is utterly arresting. I couldn't put this glorious book down."-- "Toi Derricotte, author of "I" New and Selected Poems"

"Using the metaphorical structure of a museum, Andy Young takes us on a tour of the past and present: the skull of her dead mother, poems of her mother's death by cancer, ekphrasis poems of photos and art that link the local with the wider world: a bomb shelter in Barcelona, the war dead in Damascus, a portrait of Napolean visiting Jaffa, and so much more. During an age when the world is on fire, Young offers us a ticket to travel this burning world, for a journey to Barcelona, Ecuador, Egypt, and of course Cairo and New Orleans, cities whose streets and people she intimately knows, for whom she pens precisely the music of the living, lifting us to someplace if not perhaps better, at least where we can witness for those who need us, honing grief into an epitaph we will sing and 'shudder before this bread we cannot eat / before this bread we can.' These are unforgettable poems that write themselves into the marrow and will be remembered long after you turn the last page."-- "Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys"

About the Author

Andy Young teaches creative writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has been translated into several languages, featured in classical and electronic music, in flamenco and modern dance performances, and in jewelry, tattoos, and public buses.