Now out from sandy press

The Sasquatch that walks among us has a wide-ranging wardrobe, ranging from the stylish to the stochastic. Poems about places that may never have existed, or if they did are described in a way that makes them unrecognizable. Poems about people who did exist, but never thought the thoughts that are ascribed to them here. Poems that the Sasquatch themself has inscribed on the walls of the modern-day forest they have come out in.

The Sasquatch Walks Among Us
sandy press, California
ISBN: 978-1-7368160-2-8
direct URL: at Amazon.
$US14.95

 

Blurbs

These are poems conscious of mortality’s fate. What results is music as would be played, not in but by, dusk. Thus, wryness, anger of the type refusing to go gentle in the night, acceptance, humor, irony, and more until “the noise / divides & / the song /breaks through.” They form a read so compelling that instead of “reading out of books,” you “read things into them.” Specifically, you read your life into these poems so that you can only hope your life will have contained enough of what creates the lyric: “A light moves on the north sky line … & a world is covered with jade,” or “the moon got in / under his finger- / nails like a fragment of / a Bach cantata.” — Eileen R. Tabios

Almost all of Mark Young's poems in The Sasquatch Walks Among Us comment on current culture, society, and politics fairly directly, doing so with varying levels of wryness, dismay, and humor. This variety in attitude and emotional response makes for a consistently engaging reading experience, enhanced by a great variety of forms and perspectives in the book, including prose poems, centos, sonnets, tercets, doublets, and quatrains in various combinations, and many mixed forms. There are also some poems that use wordplay, such as the almost Lettristic “Quick!”, which riffs on the letters A and I.

In a previous book, Sorties, (sandy press, 2021), a book of essays and commentary, Young describes his influences as: “No poetry”. His writing in The Sasquatch... certainly reflects this attitude, especially in the condensed prose-like diction of many of the pieces, an enhancement of prose which is not prose at all, really. “Cento I”, part of a series interspersed throughout the book, based on Pound's Cantos, is a good example of something quite different: it is a carefully constructed, and beautiful, sonnet which shows a deep familiarity with the formal aspects and sound patterns of poetry. “No poetry” is, however, a useful frame of mind to ignore so-called influences in order to write more freely and independently, which Young certainly does extremely well. Perhaps influence is the wrong word for the experience of writing out from a swarm, or an atmosphere, a deep culture of many voices of poetry, writing against them, inside them, and writing through their swarming. It is a complex evolution within a changing context. In another poem, “Strut”, he expresses dismay at the commercialization of some poetry; Ginsberg used in a fashion show, for example. I can only say that I suspect there is little danger of Young's poetry, or that of the vast majority of poets he publishes in his essential journal Otoliths, being used that way. Which is a very good thing indeed. The Sasquatch... is a wonderful book, which challenges the mind, the emotions, and one's sense of beauty again and again. — John M. Bennett