Creature Feature

Creature Feature will thrill any Dean Young fan who has been waiting eagerly to hear more from this beloved poet.

Creature Feature is Dean Young's first posthumous collection since his death in 2022. More feisty, hilarious, surreal, and heart breaking than ever, Young and his tireless inventiveness are on full display. These poems resound with mischief, aching beauty, and brazen chance. Young remains committed to the generative possibilities of poetry even as he writes us his own elegy again and again.

Young envisioned Creature Feature to serve as the third and final installment in a trilogy that includes Shock by Shock (Copper Canyon, 2015) and Solar Perplexus (Copper Canyon, 2019). Together, these three books, which cover the turbulent years following his successful heart-transplant surgery in 2011, demonstrate a vigorous recommitment to poetic recklessness and inventiveness, but also an awareness that time is short and art in our time is more urgent than ever.