Dean Young has published ten books of poetry, including Pulitzer Prize finalist Elegy on Toy Piano (University of Pittsburgh Press). His work has been honored nationally, including the Colorado Prize for Poetry for Strike Anywhere (1995), and as a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Skid (2002). A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was on the permanent faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop until becoming the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin in 2008.
Dean Young's Bender: New and Selected Poems brings together his best work across three decades, interwoven among a healthy selection of new work. The poems, presented here in alphabetical order, highlight Young's astonishing range, all the while illustrating an unwavering, persistently engaged voice: sharpwitted and entertaining, vulnerable and dead serious, as when "the heart needs its thorns / just as the rose its profligacy." Unafraid of using audacious rhymes, indecorous syntax, and downright rebellious enjambment, Young skews the world just so, restoring newness to even the most well-worn words while revealing the hiding places of beloveds everywhere.
"There is nothing Dean Young can't do in poetry, and nothing his readership won't gleefully let him get away with."
—The Huffington Post
Copper Canyon Press
