now out from Sandy Press

Mark Young
synecdoche
Sandy Press
url: Amazon
available in paperback ($US10.00) & Kindle ($US5.00)

Immersed in the speech acts of the "inescapable maelstrom" that characterizes "this rapidly evolving digital land-/ scape," Mark Young is equally focused on the "censorship-industrial complex" of burgeoning "law & ordure" fascisms. The riotous poetry of synecdoche displays Young wielding his "wizard’s mojo" to deepen our awareness of "risible inanity," "semantic non-sequiturs," "battle[s] of concepts," and "invented amulets." — Thomas Fink

Coincidentally, I read Mark Young’s synecdoche while in the midst of moving to a new house. And I noticed a relationship between the poems and contents that I unpacked. I chose boxes to unpack at random so that what surfaces from one box would not necessarily relate to what surfaces from the next box, and so on. Narratively, such, too, would seem to be the case with the poems; at one point I wondered whether the order of the poems mattered since the references are so diverse: a beggar, the pith of sugar cane, a wizard’s mojo, Margot Robbie, licorice, math...

But just as my boxes’ contents reflect me as their owner-packer, these wide-ranging poems share a common (and ambitious) interest: the entirety of existence. Poems are minimalistic snapshots of their concerns so that each poem is just a part of a larger something (perfectly exemplified by the poems whose titles are complete poems in the hay(na)ku form but whose text bodies flesh out the titular themes). Each poem reminds of a larger—immense!—truth: humanity is a shared condition. It’s a worthwhile reminder given these, our, troubled times. — Eileen R. Tabios

In synecdoche Mark Young displays the gamut of what shorter poems can do—including realistic sketches, clever realizations, and linguistic sleights-of-mind. It’s like an orchestra, and Mark is a master of every instrument. Like an amazing radio dial, whatever page/station you turn to, you’ll find something you can hum along with. — dan raphael

With his signature confident spark of higher-order humor in synecdoche, Mark Young presents an ironic reality as he slips off the cloak around the putative whole, greater than the sum of its parts and observes that the parts themselves, in their granularity and uniqueness, may in fact transcend the whole. He states, “Decompose the outline / of complex parts” before ushering in the question “But why can I see only the ingredients?” The book is replete with delicious linguistic wit, as in “Random / noises from / the vowel house” as Young wild-rides us through a series of near homophones, “ballet,” “bullet,” “belet,” “billet,” and “bull at a gate,” yielding an array of sharply different signals. These bright, clipped spurts of compressed language play their part in a leaping-off point toward an endless imaginative prowess reflecting Mark Young’s marvelous capability to re-envision the world. Apt social commentary abounds, notably in the poem “Trapezoid lunch pails,” where we hear “Now all I need is / a sports car with a big enough boot / to keep a mid-life crisis in.” Warning: The mind of Mark Young is sterling, fluid, smart, and thus addictive. As always, highly recommended. — Sheila E. Murphy