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Boy Tracy Youngblom

Boy By Tracy Youngblom

Boy by Tracy Youngblom


$39.89
Condition - New
5 in stock

Boy Summary

Boy by Tracy Youngblom

A poetry collection focused on grief and the many ways it can impact a family.

The death of a youngest child. An alcoholic and distant father. A grief-stricken family. A tentative faith. These are the building blocks of Boy, a sequence of poems that explores how death and loss color memory and influence the ways family members relate to each other and to their shared history.

Inspired by the death of her own younger brother, Tracy Youngblom has written a poetry collection that serves as a companion to grief. This book is for those who love poetry and those who are intimidated by it, those interested in the way childhood experience shapes life, and those interested in the psychology of addiction.

Boy Reviews

'I cried into a plaid shirt,' Tracy Youngblom writes about the funeral of her younger brother. 'Even / birdsong tacked to air scratched / our ears.' Defiantly observant, fiercely intelligent, we meet the speaker of this book-length sequence as the pre-teen middle sister watching her family crumble and, decades later, as the mother of her own boys grappling with the past's 'fragmented, mosaiced / wreckage.' Youngblom pulls no punches here. In her thoroughly engrossing narrative, we find not elegy, but the powerful and intimate chronicle of a woman seeking answers. * Annie Kim, author of 'Into the Cyclorama' and 'Eros, Unbroken' *
When Tracy Youngblom is a child herself, her younger brother dies, in a quick and utterly random accident. And then-the world goes on. This is the intimate and unvarnished truth of how that happens in a family, and the reality is so much more complex and varied than you could imagine: cold, desperate, cynical, cyclical, beautiful. Somehow Youngblom creates poems that are both unflinching and exquisite-just please read this book, you will never forget it. * Kirsten Dierking, author of 'One Red Eye,' 'Northern Orchards,' and 'Tether' *

About Tracy Youngblom

Tracy Youngblom is the author of two chapbooks, Driving to Heaven and One Bird a Day, and one full-length collection, Growing Big. Her poems and prose have been published in Shenandoah, Wallace Stevens Journal, Big Muddy, DMQ, Cortland Review, St. Katherine Review, Blue Mountain Review, and North Dakota Quarterly, among other journals. She lives in Minneapolis and teaches English at Anoka-Ramsey Community College.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Imagine a mirror dropped


1: The Other True Story

Before his heartbeat it was Christmas
When my melon mother finally expelled
The moon, that big innocent eye
Up close everything is different
A boy in a field is just a boy
Breeze draws everything upward: sheets
Stairs: a way to enter
Late June: our world is giddy
Such portent at your birth


2: Slide Becomes Fall

Summer: it's wild, no holds barred
In 1972, everyone has a finished basement
Middle sister, I had time to grow
Late June heat. I play catch
We think a lot. But we can't think


3: Barely Any Words

To get really good at something
Memories are like this: beach
Silence of aftermath
It sucks to be pure and predictable
Even when it appears, the truth
We could tell there was snot dripping
We didn't know him except
His objects are hidden all over


4: Suddenly Incomprehensible

The funeral has passed, we
Jesus and Lazarus came back
Look, it's the moon
That first Christmas: presents
The moon was just past full
September came with its flagrant
We prayed for others, not


5: No Leaving

Aristotle Said


6: Shapeless as the Dark

The way the wind holds its breath
This is how to bear losing
Never a time I get up when
Indian summer carves
My sister stares at me
There were so many who didn't know
First, I chose the man-leapt
So many ways to fall: carrying
When my oldest son fell down the stairs
Each time one of my three boys
His arm was in a cast from his recent fall
They will devour the centers


7: Cries of Such Pitch

Two things I have learned
I may have gotten this wrong
Suppose the carrots I tug
Not a field-a garden
So strange I want to
I am 50, and I've never seen
We go to the house of fun
Holding onto belief
I am still surrounded by boys

Additional information

NGR9781933880990
9781933880990
1933880996
Boy by Tracy Youngblom
New
Paperback
CavanKerry Press
2023-01-27
88
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a new book - be the first to read this copy. With untouched pages and a perfect binding, your brand new copy is ready to be opened for the first time

Customer Reviews - Boy