Mark Young
The Hit List
52 pages
b&w free downloadable pdf
Scud Editions
url: https://scudlit.blogspot.com/p/editions.html
A collection of around 55 recent poems.
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harry k stammer, Mark Cunningham, & Mark Young
Gravel
66 pages
poetry & visuals
full color
paperback ($US15.00)& Kindle($US5.00)
Sandy Press
url: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DY56DHV7
Gravel. Might have been called that because it was like walking over it in bare feet to get three grumpy old men to agree on how this book should be put together — identifiers or anonymous; interspersed small offerings or a three-tiered cake; with or without an intro?
Or? Call it that because it's a word with other, quite divergent, words built in & easily accessed — rave, ave, grave, Ravel — & that's before discarding the original order.
Or? Each of the pieces, as denoted by the poet's name, being inserted into the document in a random way, like gravel on a path. The point here is to cross each author's approach in a way that does or doesn’t affect the how of how the pieces relate to each other. Does this matter in terms of how a reader understands each alone & at the same time how a reader may understand the whole & the poetry within the total work?
Or? What is there to introduce? The Pisan Cantos and Zukofsky's A made do without introductions, if I recall. Maybe when you’re famous—or post-famous, so that people need to be told how important you are. Were. Is that “you” plural? Or, as with Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems, you can have a blurb with more words in it than most of the books included. Then you can get somebody to write an introduction to tell us who the blurb writer, Vito Acconci, is. Was. Who will introduce the introducer?
Or? The only true blurb would be along the lines of: "If you read this book and get irritated as hell & say to yourself, 'Anybody could do that,' then you're got the real spirit of the book."
Take all of the above, & it's no wonder they invited me in to compose the introduction. All suggestions will be welcomed. Keep watching this space.
— Kasimir Malevich, February
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Mark Young
Some Unrecorded Voyages of Vasco da Gama
88 pages
poetry & visuals
full color
paperback ($US24.75)
Otoliths
url: https://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-young/some-unrecorded-voyages-of-vasco-da-gama/paperback/product-e748z2j.html?page=1&pageSize=4
My first poem in the geographies series appeared on my gamma ways blog at the beginning of 2009. I feel that the best description of my intent comes from Sam Lohmann who published some in an issue of the journal Peaches & Bats that he was editing at the time: "These pieces by Mark Young have a disturbing and comic speed, and seem, as a group, to get at some essential weirdness of the 'global' info-capitalist culture we're all trying to survive and live in."
I began the visual geographies just under a couple of years later. At first they tended to be poems on a background, but gradually transformed into digital manipulations of images from places I looked up on the web. As time went on, I refined those locations to Australia & New Zealand, sometimes with a word or two added; but the intent was the same for the visuals as for the poems — the world is something different to what it's claimed to be.
There have been five standalone collections of geographies over the years, mainly in chapbook or pdf format, plus a significant tranche in the wide-ranging 600-page collection, The Codicils, that came out from Otoliths in 2013. This new collection, Some Unrecorded Voyages of Vasco da Gama, contains a number of visuals &, probably, the final geographies poems.
— Mark Young
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Mark Young
Closed Environment
24 pages
b&w free & downloadable
Neo-Mimeo Editions, from Nualláin House
url: https://nuallainhousepublishers.com/2025/03/03/closed-environment/
"Neo-Mimeo endeavors to return to the fast and cheap no frills esthetic of mimeo in a non-scrolling digital slideshow left to right reading format. The texts are replicated in the limited typewriter font styles then available, generally Courier or Prestige, but in a larger point size (16 vs.12) to accommodate readability on the small screen. The bold text presentation alludes to the often over inked stencils in mimeo production. Each Neo-Mimeo poetry selection, like many original mimeo books, is limited to approximately 20 pages. A pdf file of Neo-Mimeo titles is available for those who wish to produce their own hard copy; staples not included."
— Pat Nolan
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Mark Young
The Complete Post Person Poems
138 pages
b&w (paperback), full color (Kindle)
(paperback) $US12.50 (Kindle) $US6.25
Sandy Press
url: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZHXYYH7
One never knows what's going to turn up in Mark's mail. I've even turned up — all 6'7" of me — in the postbag. Every page holds a surprise. Mark delivers! —Tom Beckett
In The Complete Post Person Poems, Mark Young delivers “the can” or rather, cans "of worms/ I’d always/ wanted to open.” Master builder/decorator of “a room to put/ the elephant in,” Young helps us achieve some measure of “Gunk Control” through an ironic, fiercely punny wit that is replete with cogent historical and current allusions and accounts of wild misprisions. His “melodious thunks” provide superb rejoinders to the “polemic/ pandemic” that assails the globe. —Thomas Fink
In The Complete Post Person Poems intellectual Tom-Foolery via the official postal system has at it at full speed! — Cathy M. Bennett
All writers have a fraught relationship with the postal service. Mark Young’s remedy is The Complete Post Person Poems, a uniquely multifaceted otherworldly disco ball showering kaleidoscopic colors down onto poetry’s dance floor. Shake that thang. —Pat Nolan
The Complete Post Person Poems does nothing less than bring the world to you. How lucky we are to receive Mark Young's mail. —Brad Liening
After reading this book, I will never think of aubergines in the same way again. Now I must realize: I don't even know what an aubergine is. And the author makes me feel funny about my subscription to the Conspiracy Theory Quarterly. I think he did this on purpose. He is dangerous and no one should read this book. —Mark Cunningham
Mark Young picks a thread in a ball of golden wool and gives it a pull and it never ends. Magic everywhere. —John Geraets
Chance and its output, notably infinite shades of humor, when examined and relished, teach even beyond experience, offering as a bonus “a room to put the elephant in.” —Sheila E. Murphy
Mark Young has given the meaning of a postman's "meaning" in meaning a delivery god. Send and ye shall receive. — harry k stammer
Mark Young IS the Complete Post Person, delivering to us all the news we need to read, to reread, to remember. For these poems we will remember. Here he's given us back so much of our world – the terrible and the terrific – and for that we need to say: thank you, Mark. —Michael Gottlieb
Don’t
call me
biased for concluding
the Hay(na)ku created
its best
poem
because its postman
delivered with
sensitivity
—Eileen R. Tabios
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& a note for those of you who have a Kindle Unlimited membership. The Magritte Poems, which was released late last year, is now available for no charge as part of that membership.
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