A review of terracotta worriers

posted to Goodreads by Grady Harp.

Theater of the Absurd

It takes awhile to get into Mark Young's chapbook TERRACOTTA WORRIERS. The initial page of this handsome download shows the now famous and well regarded image of the buried statues of warriors in China, and unless the reader's eye is acutely tuned to the humor that lies within this collection of poems, the first connection seems to be that the title reads Terracotta Warriors instead of Worriers. That's how keen Young plays with the eye and the sensitivity to humor of the reader.

What follows is a series of thirteen poems that simply play with facts and allusions and in solid format create single page seemingly serious poems that find the central core of humor so often mistaken as contemporary journalism: what appears to be reportage and factual is in fact disjointed nonsense - with a thrust of choreographed genius!

Mark Young is up there with Salvador Dali and Gertrude Stein. Download this collection of ingeniously pasted absurdities and enjoy a very bright poet at work!