my new collection

turning to drones
Concrete Mist Press
$US14.95
available through Amazon

These compelling poems exhibit, through their concise and wide-ranging vocabulary, forms, and referents, an extraordinary skill at revealing directly and/or indirectly a strong and authentic engagement with the human world and its problems, and with how those problems reverberate in the consciousness and emotions of the poet/experiencer. There is a concern throughout, laced with considerable irony, with the conflict or contrast between current affairs and culture and a more coherent or more desirable value-based world which may have existed in the distant or more recent past, or at least in the hopes of our species: “Something about a conflation of / music & power, both of which can / be seen as a series of 'lines' on / photographic film. The literature / on the subject is immense, usually / in high quality peer-reviewed full- / text publications, & embellished / with consumer reviews & price com- / parisons...” A kind of double vision forms many of these poems, expressed tautologically at times, as if the same thing said twice were different each time: “I am writing the / introduction to a / book of dreams. This / is the first dream.” This leads to a truly engaging enigma or ambiguity in which a meaning means something else: “...tendency of parents to give / projects based around lexical statistics / means dictionaries will pop up before / you're even halfway into the entry / vestibule.” This, I believe, is the most important function of poetry, to remove that membrane of social constructs that form our perceptions of “reality”.

Young's skill with language and form is in itself a source of delight in this book. For example, his forms include sonnets, non-stanzaic structures, structures with widely variant stanza arrangements, a poem with the title at the end, a poem consisting only of questions, poems in the form of an ambiguous and elliptical internet exchange, the use of punctuation as visual elements, blocks of apparently disconnected words as a mantra, prose poems, and others. In short this book is a delight, full of humor, irony, dismay, mysterious and stimulating conjunctions of the things that form human life. — Dr. John M. Bennett

In his new collection, turning to drones, as in his numerous other books, Mark Young uses language, especially, English and French, as raw material and flexible elements for associative and collage compositions that are often challenging to decode—if decoding is desirable, necessary, or intended at all. Young, who has produced at least one collector's item, the vispo book, les échiquiers effrontés (Luna Bisonte Prods, 2018), provides his readers with no easy answers, sharing his perceptions of real or imagined events, spaces, beings, and experiences—fractured by disparate interests and historical narratives having social, political, and personal import. One can always count on this author's work to deliver imagery, innovative form, humor, and “language play,” while, at the same time, refusing to offer easy answers and determinant significance. Like all Postmodern creations, meaning remains in the mind of the reader, and Young's surrealist influences infuse his oeuvre with “interpretive power”—inquiries, complex juxtapositions, spliced elements, dream analysis, and other psychological effects. If you appreciate or are curious about, innovative literature, turning to drones will reward you with the above-mentioned pleasures and will highlight, as well, the author's penchant for creating short poems and stand-alone titles—one-line poetic fragments with their own aesthetic qualities. Mark Young is among the most notable contemporary text and vispo artists whose new offering will enrich your sensory and intellectual life.
— Clara B. Jones, Knowledge Worker, Silver Spring, MD, USA