Aim Straight at the Fountain & Press Vaporize

Poetry. Winner of the 2009 Motherwell Prize. An exuberant skeptic, Elizabeth Marie Young writes in the infidel hope that writing itself can create worlds. These hilariously erudite prose poems are cosmologies--miniature, ever-expanding universes crammed with over-active particulars. They are interactive environments, kaleidoscopic and incorrigibly changeable, in which competing impulses toward cerebral austerity and luxuriant beauty battle it out. These poems crystallize into radiant geometries even as they threaten to self-destruct: distinctly utopian, pulsing with the defiant exuberance of drag and disco and steeped in the lemonade oceans of Charles Fourier. Antiquity lingers as a locus of incomprehensibility, startling us into novelty. Elizabeth Marie Young coins new myths, drawing in classical material only to see how it looks wrestling in the mud with surfers, yogis, and cyborgs.

An exuberant skeptic, Elizabeth Marie Young writes in the infidel hope that writing itself can create worlds. She coins new myths, drawing in classical material only to see how it looks wrestling in the mud with surfers, yogis, and cyborgs. These hilariously erudite prose poems are cosmologies--miniature, ever-expanding universes crammed with over-active particulars.

"This volume is a guide to alternative word-worlds—it is their index."

--Lyn Hejinian

ELIZABETH MARIE YOUNG recently completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley. In New York she played in several experimental noise bands, DJd at WKCR-FM, taught high school, and helped edit the Poetry Project Newsletter. She now teaches Latin, ancient Greek and English poetry at Wellesley College. Her work has appeared in the collections Ghosting Atoms and Viz. A chapbook came out in 2008 from Omahrahu.