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9781961897328

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Reviews

C. Dale Young's Building the Perfect Animal opens with a heart being set in the torso of the first man, then a soul being set in that heart. It calls to mind Genesis's explosion of light, but Young's illuminations come from the chest, the big beating heart of experience. From Ovid to foie gras ducks, from Patroclus to Golden Gate Park, the new poems yearn and tumble toward meaning. This volume also offers verse curated from Young's thirty years of singular writing, poems I read with delight and humility, each page demonstrating why he has become, for so many, indispensable, something real, something lasting. --Kaveh Akbar For thirty years, C. Dale Young has quietly written moving poems of clarity and precision. In Building the Perfect Animal, we appreciate not only these strengths in the new poems, but see within the generous selection from prior books the entirety of his deeply humane vision. Despite their intelligence, his poems stand as a record of the heart and body, a record of empathy. --Natasha Trethewey Graceful and thrilling, C. Dale Young's Building the Perfect Animal is a tour de force. Over three decades, Young has built, book by book, an unforgettable body of work that seems to have arrived fully formed, like one of the old gods of the ocean rising from the water: chiseled, melancholy, and brimming with heart. This book will enchant you and refuse to let you go. --Tomás Q. Morín

Author Information

C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He is the author of The Affliction (Four Way Books, 2018), a novel in stories, and the poetry collections The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern, 2001); The Second Person (Four Way Books, 2007), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; Torn (Four Way Books, 2011), named one of the best poetry collections of 2011 by National Public Radio; The Halo (Four Way Books, 2016), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; and Prometeo (Four Way Books, 2021). He is a previous recipient of the Grolier Prize, the Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Literary Editing, and the 2017/2018 Hanes Award in Poetry given by the Fellowship of Southern Writers to honor a poet at mid-career. A fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, his poems and short fiction have appeared widely. He lives in San Francisco.

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