synecdoche

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